Measuring Officer Knowledge and Experience to Enable Tailored Training

Tailoring training can improve effectiveness and efficiency. However, before informed decisions regarding tailoring Army institutional training can be made, instruments that predict performance must be available. Instructors from the Engineer Captains Career Course at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, were interviewed to determine which parts of the course could best distinguish the performance of different officers. Based on those interviews, performance on the Defensive Planning exam was chosen, as it clearly indicated some officers as performing well, some average, and some poorly. Five types of predictors were constructed to assess how they were related to how well officers performed on the Defensive Planning exam. The first was small group instructors' forecasts of officers' later performance on their Defensive Planning exams. The second was general biographic characteristics of the officers, which anecdotal evidence indicated instructors used to assess relevant experience. The third was officers' scores on a measure that asked questions relevant to their Defensive Planning training and educational experiences. The fourth asked officers to rate their own ability to execute activities related to Defensive Planning. The fifth type was a test of prior knowledge. Results showed that prior knowledge alone predicted criterion performance, but only for officers with no prior enlistment experience. In addition, the interrelationships among the variables differed markedly between officers with prior enlisted experience and officers without. These results underscore the need for empirically validating performance predictors in Army courses. We discuss in detail how these findings enable instructors to make informed decisions about tailoring training. The original document contains color images.