CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N17A-T004

Description

Senior management personnel within NAVAIR and other Navy organizations are faced with the complex task of making investment and acquisition decisions regarding training programs and human performance-related technologies. Currently, training decisions are often being made without the aid of objective data, leading to best guesses based on heuristics and previous experience, with recent literature informing those heuristics. While qualitative arguments can be made, and PowerPoint slides may be crafted in support of particular viewpoints, there is no central theory or technique currently employed to reason about these complex judgments. Additionally, due to the frequency of new information, techniques are required to integrate new findings into future decisions, rather than using stale data for modern judgments. To address these challenges, we propose to design and demonstrate a System to Analyze and Visualize Evaluations of Instruction Techniques (SAVE-IT). SAVE-IT is a customizable approach that uses Systemic Functional Grammars and a Research Capture Tool developed under a DARPA program to aggregate research into a refined knowledge base. Taking in parameters that reflect user preferences and well- defined training requirements, SAVE-IT ranks and visualizes training recommendations in an easily understandable and exportable format.