An Interdisciplinary Approach to Evaluating U.S. Army Aviation Training

The U.S. Army is seeking to update and expand its use of simulation-based aviation trainingto address operational and fiscal concerns that are driving the need for more efficient training solutions.This has created a needto evaluate whether lower-cost, game-based simulations may potentially augment higher-cost, traditional simulation-based trainingfor specific aviation training tasks.However, current approaches to Training Effectiveness Evaluation (TEE) do not address the complete range of factors to adequately evaluate today’s increasingly sophisticated simulation training environments. Leveraging recent research and drawing from the tools and techniques of human performance assessment, instructional science, and phenomenology, an interdisciplinary approach to performing TEEs is introduced and describedin the context of evaluating UH-60A/L aviation collective mission training. This novel TEE approach optimizes a research-based evaluation methodology to more fully capturethe range of factors that contribute to training effectiveness ininteractive simulation training environments