Training for Efficient, Durable, and Flexible Performance in the Military

Abstract

To optimize performance in the military, training should be efficient, durable, and flexible. Efficiency is essential because of the high costs of training. Military training also must be durable to ensure long-term retention of the trained knowledge and skills for later success in the field. But durable training will be insufficient if the learned knowledge and skills cannot be applied to situations different from those encountered during training. Because training can rarely capture the full set of circumstances under which tasks are subsequently encountered, another important goal for training is transfer or flexibility. Five separate lines of research contribute to this report. The first three demonstrate a high degree of specificity of learning. The authors identified certain circumstances that lead to remarkable durability of what has been learned, yet these same conditions yield very poor flexibility, or the ability to generalize learning to new situations or contexts. Empirical findings are presented illustrating specificity and summarizing their theoretical explanations for the particular tasks they investigated. They propose a general theoretical framework that can account for the high degree of specificity obtained in these studies and that also enables them to predict when learning will be generalizable rather than specific. In addition, in support of their theoretical framework, results from two other lines of research are summarized demonstrating situations showing robust transfer of learning. The results from all five lines of research summarized here support the working hypothesis that there is specificity (limited transfer) for tasks based primarily on procedural information, or skill, whereas there is generality (robust transfer) for tasks based primarily on declarative information, or facts. Thus, these studies provide evidence that for skill learning, retention is high but transfer is low; for fact learning, retention is low but transfer is high.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.