Instructional System for Enhancing Seakeeping Cognitive Readiness and Decision-Making Skills

"Planing hull craft pose unique safety challenges. The Mark V Special Operations Craft, for instance, carries Special Operations Forces in littoral waters and travels at very high speeds. Failure to adequately negotiate wave conditions may result ininjury to the crew and damage to the craft. The requisite seakeeping skills, however, are difficult to master. What is needed is a comprehensive instructional system that improves safety and compresses learning. In this project, we will demonstrate amethodology for training system design that is focused on the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities for seakeeping. Because of the difficulty of understanding the precise nature of seakeeping expertise, our strategy employs a multifaceted approachbased on intense observation and analysis. This strategy includes a formal review of the task situation to identify relationships for control, followed by an analysis of expert performance to assess which of those possibilities is exploited, and finally,an empirical evaluation to confirm that those relationships are used in operational performance. These analyses will enable us to define principles of seakeeping from which we will develop training strategies. We will illustrate our approach through aconceptual prototype of a training system that speaks directly to critical abilities. The outcome of this program of development will be a comprehensive training system that is specifically tuned t