Measuring Learning and Development in Cross-Cultural Competence

Contemporary operational environments are often characterized by ambiguous, multi-cultural contexts, where Army Soldiers must rapidly adapt without extensive prior knowledge of a region or its people. Ongoing training development efforts are addressing the need for general cultural competence, but this broad competence must be clearly defined and assessed in order to determine if our Soldiers are being adequately prepared. To support this goal, we propose to develop a stage model of general cross-cultural competence. We will leverage relevant features of existing cultural competence models, skill and expertise acquisition models across multiple domains, and the expertise of cultural trainers and Solders recognized as highly adaptable in cross-cultural settings. The model will represent a learner’s transition across stages of cultural competence from novice to expert, where the end goal is the ability to rapidly and accurately assess a new culture and determine how to achieve goals using that understanding. The model will further guide the development of scenario-based metrics and other metrics that will clearly define competence at all levels of development, and across trainable behavioral, cognitive, motivational and affective skills.