Technical Review of the Declarative to Procedural Tutor for Moving Target Tutor (Review of D2P/MTT 11/27/2012)

The Moving Target Tutor (MTT) is a computer-based, multimedia tutoring system designed to teach people an important skill in marksmanship: shooting moving targets. To hit moving targets, a person must be able to quickly retrieve the correct Points of Aim (PoA). PoA is how far to lead a moving target based on the range of the target, how fast it is moving, and the angle between shooter and the target's heading. MTT uses a learning theory (Kim, Koubek, & Ritter 2013) implemented in an architecture called D2P (Ritter, Yeh, Cohen, Weyhrauch, Kim, & Hobbs, 2013). MTT contains approximately two to three hours of instructional materials including instructional text, pictures, audio, videos, and quizzes. These materials are then presented in the D2P program that is capable of handling other tutoring content. In this paper we present the effect of using MTT in learning PoA by university students. We found our participants improved in accuracy (more than tripled their ability to judge PoA, effect size = 3.7) and an improvement in PoA of ) and, simultaneously, reduced the time to determine PoA. Although the participants may not have had a need to master marksmanship for purposes outside of this study, this report still provides insights about the effectiveness of using MTT, along with D2P, and points to directions for future improvements. Sponsored in part by grant no. N00014-10-1-0401.