Accelerating Expertise to Facilitate Decision Making in High-Risk Professions Using the DACUM System

The purpose of this research was to determine whether the process of achieving occupational expertise could be accelerated enabling operators in high risk vocations to make effective decisions earlier in their careers. Scholars have hypothesized good decision making skills are largely a result of relevant experience within the specific domain. The rationale being that the greater the experience an individual has the more likely the operator has experienced similar situations and can apply solutions that have been successful in the past. Two distinct methods of decision making have been identified: traditional decision making and naturalistic decision making (NDM). The ability to implement the traditional decision making method effectively is contingent on the availability of sufficient information and adequate time for the individual to examine the information, construct and weigh options, and ultimately choose the action that the operator deems most appropriate given the data at the time. Naturalistic decision making is a process an operator can employ in a high risk, dynamic situation (e.g., military personnel in combat, fireground commanders on-scene, police officers confronting armed criminals) to make decisions when data may be incomplete and time is critically short. Both processes depend on the operator\u27s domain expertise. Research has shown the naturalistic decision making process is the method many high risk operators revert to when conditions do not permit a deliberate, analytical decision-making approach. These conditions include ambiguous situations, serious time constraints, or inadequate information. Studies have determined that the fundamental element of NDM is domain experience, i.e., the seasoned decision-maker compares the current situation to a similar experience from the past. This pattern recognition enables the decision maker to apply tactics that successfully resolved previous problems. The overarching limitation in NDM is gaining the requisite domain experience. One pedagogical process that has been recognized to enable occupational instructors to identify requisite skills and accelerate the process of placing operators in their chosen vocation is the method known as Design A Curriculum (DACUM). The DACUM process breaks an occupation down into areas of competence and the skills required within each area. Each skill level is given a numerical rating indicating the minimum performance standard for that skill. An operator with skills from a similar occupation can test for that skill and if the minimum performance level is achieved the operator is given credit for that skill and can focus subsequent efforts on other areas or skills. The DACUM process can help accelerate the training process and place an operator into the vocation sooner and thus begin gaining experience in the domain. The DACUM process was employed for this research. A panel of expert firefighter instructors were assembled and spent two days analyzing the occupation of acquired structure live burn instructor

Student Pilot Situational Awareness: The Effects of Trust in Technology

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the general level of trust in technology in student pilots and then to determine the relationship between pilots\u27 trust and their situational awareness during simulated flight. A literature review revealed that the Jian Trust Scale was based on empirical observations and had precedence in the literature so it was selected. Since excessive reliance on technology can make the operator passive and unquestioning, ultimately loss of situational awareness may result. The main hypothesis tested was to establish the relationship between measurements of trust on the ground and situational awareness in simulated flight; pilots who had lower-trust in technology were expected to have to maintain higher levels of situational awareness. Conversely, higher-trust pilots were expected to have lower situational awareness due to an over reliance on the equipment. Instructor pilots rated the 30 students in simulated flight using a modified Situation Awareness Global Assessment Techniques (SAGAT) score and this was compared to their Trust score derived from ground based testing. The results were opposite from those expected but significant facts were discovered. The pilots with the highest trust scores showed the best situational awareness. This study concludes that the trust is not blind in ERAU pilots, they seem to trust the instruments and yet also maintain good situational awareness. The results were not as clear for the middle trust scoring pilots and suggests that trust and situational awareness are not as related. The need for monitoring situational awareness is discussed and the use of a simple and rapid ground based trust score may indicate which students would most benefit from improving their situational awareness would be the middle scorers on a trust scale. The simplicity of this approach to identifying those in need of improving situational awareness and the successful prediction of high trusting pilots and good situational awareness, suggests that a better trust scale, one geared specifically for general aviation, would be useful

A case study assessment of operational effectiveness for an advanced helicopter flight simulator : the CH146 tactical helicopter mission simulator

Flight simulators are widely used for training in both military and civil aviation, and the scope of applications in simulation has expanded widely during approximately the last three decades. A fundamental question in the effective application of this technology is the extent to which training in a simulator constitutes adequate preparation for actual flight. The process of validation of simulator effectiveness is as yet not well defined, and the common, though mistaken, association of high fidelity with high training effectiveness clouds the determination of the degree of fidelity required to achieve specific training objectives. It is axiomatic in simulation that no ground-based training device can achieve perfect fidelity, and the present state of the art is such that incremental improvements in fidelity will yield diminishing returns in training effectiveness. Far greater benefits can be realized from attention to more effective utilization of the existing systems. This thesis details the difficulties inherent in the determination of training effectiveness for a mission simulator. Experience with a specific military simulator acquisition project, the Canadian Forces\u27 CHI46 Griffon tactical helicopter mission simulator, is used in this paper to highlight the challenges inherent in validating simulator training effectiveness; particularly that of a tactical full-mission simulator. The author\u27s experience indicates that the key limitations to achieving optimum training effectiveness lie not in maximizing the fidelity of the simulation, but in knowing how to effectively exploit its existing capabilities. Challenges remain in the areas of validation, syllabus design, instructional technique and user interface. The effective use of training technology has become of critical importance, given the technical sophistication of modern simulators. The understandable desire to extract maximum utilization from simulators has led to suboptimal use of very expensive investments

A Generic Intelligent Architecture for Computer-Aided Training of Procedural Knowledge

Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) development is a knowledge-intensive task, suffering from the same knowledge acquisition bottleneck that plagues most Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. This research presents an architecture that requires knowledge only in the form of a shallow knowledge base and a simulation to produce a training system. The knowledge base provides the basic procedural knowledge while the simulation provides context. The remainder of the knowledge required for training is learned through the interaction of these components in a state-space scenario exploration process and inductive machine learning. These knowledge components are used only at the interface level, allowing the internal representation to take any form that meets the interface requirements. A prototype of this architecture is implemented as a proof-of-concept to illustrate the viability of the key knowledge acquisition techniques

Proceedings of the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology, Volume 1

These proceedings are organized in the same manner as the conference's contributed sessions, with the papers grouped by topic area. These areas are as follows: VE (virtual environment) training for Space Flight, Virtual Environment Hardware, Knowledge Aquisition for ICAT (Intelligent Computer-Aided Training) & VE, Multimedia in ICAT Systems, VE in Training & Education (1 & 2), Virtual Environment Software (1 & 2), Models in ICAT systems, ICAT Commercial Applications, ICAT Architectures & Authoring Systems, ICAT Education & Medical Applications, Assessing VE for Training, VE & Human Systems (1 & 2), ICAT Theory & Natural Language, ICAT Applications in the Military, VE Applications in Engineering, Knowledge Acquisition for ICAT, and ICAT Applications in Aerospace

The historical development and basis of human factors guidelines for automated systems in aeronautical operations

In order to derive general design guidelines for automated systems a study was conducted on the utilization and acceptance of existing automated systems as currently employed in several commercial fields. Four principal study area were investigated by means of structured interviews, and in some cases questionnaires. The study areas were aviation, a both scheduled airline and general commercial aviation; process control and factory applications; office automation; and automation in the power industry. The results of over eighty structured interviews were analyzed and responses categoried as various human factors issues for use by both designers and users of automated equipment. These guidelines address such items as general physical features of automated equipment; personnel orientation, acceptance, and training; and both personnel and system reliability

Vertical flight training: An overview of training and flight simulator technology with emphasis on rotary-wing requirements

The principal purpose of this publication is to provide a broad overview of the technology that is relevant to the design of aviation training systems and of the techniques applicable to the development, use, and evaluation of those systems. The issues addressed in our 11 chapters are, for the most part, those that would be expected to surface in any informed discussion of the major characterizing elements of aviation training systems. Indeed, many of the same facets of vertical-flight training discussed were recognized and, to some extent, dealt with at the 1991 NASA/FAA Helicopter Simulator Workshop. These generic topics are essential to a sound understanding of training and training systems, and they quite properly form the basis of any attempt to systematize the development and evaluation of more effective, more efficient, more productive, and more economical approaches to aircrew training. Individual chapters address the following topics: an overview of the vertical flight industry: the source of training requirements; training and training schools: meeting current requirements; training systems design and development; transfer of training and cost-effectiveness; the military quest for flight training effectiveness; alternative training systems; training device manufacturing; simulator aero model implementation; simulation validation in the frequency domain; cockpit motion in helicopter simulation; and visual space perception in flight simulators