Measuring and Assessing Maneuver Squad Leader Adaptability

Despite decades of research, there has been little progress to operationalize the construct of adaptability nor to assess proficiency as a means of providing insight into the cognitive readiness of the Force. The military requires research and development of well-defined performance criteria for adaptability assessment and training. The research team proposes to develop operational definitions of adaptability and three supporting cognitive skillscognitive flexibility, anomaly detection, and change detectionto provide clear criteria regarding performance of the constructs. Hypotheses as to the relationships among these four constructs will be generated. Finally, a domain-specific assessment instrument will be developed within which the well-defined performance can be elicited and assessed. The instrument, a Virtual Adaptability Module, will employ a domain-specific approach to stimulate and measure the performance of interest. A series of interactive vignettes and videos will be produced by leveraging procedural content generation to gain efficiencies in development. Adaptive assessment that scales the level of difficulty to individual test-taker proficiencies will be employed to realize assessment efficiencies. The final Virtual Adaptability Module will function as a standalone assessment as well as a component of the Small Unit Decision Making Assessment Battery.