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performed better on the second game. It may be that, while playing the first game, these broadly
trained participants gained additional knowledge of the role of their partners. This learning
could have been facilitated by their exposure to training on all assets, and that learning could
have led to improvement in later performance. However, players given DbN training on the less
crucial assets of the "air controller" position seem to have been at an initial disadvantage, one
that only increased in the second game.
The results presented here support the view that collaborative tasks benefit when the
collaborating participants have a broader, system-wide view of the entire situation. At least in
this experiment, training that concentrated on a single role was only beneficial if that role was
complex enough to require considerable training depth. It should be emphasized, however, that
these results are only preliminary and this research is continuing. In particular, further iterations
of this experiment will include a final measure of asset knowledge, in order to provide a direct
test of the hypothesis that cross-training facilitates on-the-job learning.
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45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003