Estimating Skill Degradation for Aviation Antisubmarine Warfare Operators (AWs): Loss of Skill and Knowledge Following Training

Subjects, 20 AWs in the S-3A training pipeline who attended a basic acoustic analysis course and a follow-on operator course, were tested to determine if they retained the skills and knowledge required for satisfactory performance of acoustic analysis and classification over the 25-day nonutilization period between the two courses. The original learning measure was the basic course final examination, comprised of (1) a multiple-choice knowledge exam consisting of both factual and computational items, and (2) a performance test that examined student performance of acoustic analysis and classification procedures on static linear lofargrams. The retention measure, administered approximately 1 month later, consisted of alternate forms of the original measure. Results showed that students performed better on the original measure than on the retention tests for most of the variables analyzed. Significant differences were found for all scores on the knowledge test (overall, the factual test items, and the computational test items) and for performance for the analysis variables on the performance test. No significant differences were found for the classification variable. It was concluded that, over the 25-day nonutilization period, the skills and knowledge of students in the S-3A acoustic analyst training pipeline degraded significantly.