The Naval Education and Training Command: Stakeholder in the Training Assessment Framework

• In Event: New, Generalizable Strategies for Developing Assessments for the Naval Education and Training Command

Abstract

The NETC and a multi-disciplinary team of stakeholders from Navy organizations join together to research and develop a systematic approach to innovations in learning, teaching, and assessment. Key attributes and purposes of the TAF collaboration will be considered.

The US Navy is presently in a state of transformation, massively modernizing the force for greater future proficiency. Concurrent efforts are underway to accomplish this mission in manpower, personnel training and education. All require improving recruiting, training, and assignment to the Fleet. As the lead for Force Development, NETC maintains an integral role to ensure that modernized training is successfully delivered to the point of need in each Sailor’s Learning Continuum. As the Navy moves away from the traditional conveyor-belt approach to delivering Fleet-ready Sailors, there is accelerating demand to employ a common framework to capture key elements.

NETC’s Strategic Planning, Metrics, Innovation, and Research and Development (R&D) branch is collaborating with UCLA on TAF. The collaboration includes the identification of stakeholders and their respective purposes and requirements. The TAF’s conceptual architecture includes features relevant to each stakeholder’s functional requirements. For the Selection and Classification community, the TAF’s coherent design principles will generate metrics to validate decisions of tools such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). For training decision makers, these same outcome metrics will provide improved technical information about which learners are excelling and which are struggling (and, in many cases, why e.g. motivation). Further, the TAF will facilitate when and how instructors deploy interventions with individual students. Processes of development include check-ins with management staff, including periodic briefings of those in relevant units. The instructors and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) participate in the design, review, and response to the assessments. The plan is to begin with a few ratings (courses to prepare for particular job skills) for end-of-course assessment in order to verify that the approach is usable across different content and skills. To date, data have been collected and reviewed from three ratings.

Based on findings, the TAF will potentially inform curricula by depicting a trainee’s proficiency in job-specific areas. For acquisition, TAF will apprise vendors on standards and parameters for assessment design and measures required for new training systems. For the R&D community, TAF will demonstrate a number of innovative approaches to developing and deploying assessments.

The scientific and practical value of this approach will be pervasive as linkage among separate Navy training elements are strengthened. Due to the complex nature of developing a conceptual assessment architecture that is comprehensive, scalable, and serves multiple purposes, persistent communication has been required to ensure requirements are integrated early and often throughout the TAF R&D process. This effort exemplifies the art of the possible when disparate organizations and communities come together to share and collaborate with a common purpose of building something purposeful for all. Thus, the output of the TAF is not only its design features but also the method of collaboration that has been required at scale.

Author

• Benjamin Ervin, Naval Education and Training Command