2003 IMTA Proceedings - International Military Testing Association

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variable may be stated in terms of training depth and breadth. That is, those participants who
receive a double exposure to training on their own set of assets are receiving deep but narrow
training. They should be turned into fairly good "experts," with confidence in their
understanding of their own role in finding the missing SCUD launchers, but with little or no
understanding of the contribution that could be made by their partners. On the other hand, those
participants who receive training on both their own assets and those of their partners may be said
to receive broad but shallow training. They may have some understanding of how they and their
partners can work together toward successfully finding the launchers, but they may not be very
confident in their ability to apply any of the specific knowledge they were taught. We are
asking: Which type of training, deep but narrow (DbN) or broad but shallow (BbS) leads to
better performance?
Two other independent variables were automatically included in the experiment by the
nature of the task. The first is position, whether a participant was assigned the "ground
controller" position, in charge of the information gathering assets that are "on the ground" (a
single spy, a team of Navy Seals, a Joint Special Operations team, and a communications
analysis unit), or the "air controller" position, in charge of the gathering assets that are "airborne"
(a reconnaissance satellite, a manned aircraft, and an unoccupied aerial vehicle). The second is
the sequence of turns in the two games all participants played, a variable that may be thought of
as representing increasing on-the-job experience. Our experimental questions are, therefore, how
the first two variables, training and position, affect game performance across the five turns of the
two games, separately and in interaction.
Method
Participants. This experiment employed undergraduate students at a large university in Virginia.
A total of 52 students received course credit for two hours of participation, for which they were
scheduled as 26 pairs.
Instruments. In addition to an Informed Consent form and various questionnaires used in other
aspects of this research, the following measurement instruments were used in the course of this
experiment: 1) The asset quizzes on the knowledge the participants acquired during training
prior to playing the game, and 2) The SCUDHunt game, itself, described below:
The SCUDHunt game presents players with the mission of determining where – on a
five-by-five board representing the map of a hostile country – the launchers for SCUD missiles
are located. The players are told that there are three such launchers, each in a different fixed
location on one square among the 25 squares on the board. On each of five turns, the players
deploy intelligence-gathering assets (for example, a reconnaissance satellite or a team of Navy
Seals), receive reports from those assets, and create a “strike plan” (to be sent to their fictional
commander) indicating their best guess at that point as to the launcher locations. They are told
that only the final strike plan – after the fifth turn – will actually be used by their commander to
direct an attack on the launchers, and they are given the results of this final strike plan in terms of
which bombed location held a now-destroyed launcher. This game is a representation of the kind
45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003