Research Summaries

Back Expanded Research in Eyetracking to Improve Conning Officer Training Systems

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Modeling, Virtual Environments & Simulation Institute
Investigator(s) McDowell, Perry L.
Kennedy, Meghan Q.
Sponsor Surface Warfare Officers School Command (Navy)
Summary The conning officer virtual environment-intelligent tutoring system (COVE-ITS) provides performance feedback to shiphandling students at Surface Warfare Officers School (SWOS). If a student is not performing a task at satisfactory levels, the ITS will take various actions to prompt the student to correct his/her performance. It provides a graduated response, moving from giving hints to more detailed recommendations, and finally, in some cases, it specifically states the problem and advises how to correct.
To enhance the effectiveness of an ITS, a suitable model of the trainee’s mental state should be developed. Good human tutors know that the same mistake may stem from many different causes, and they tailor their remediation using their perception of why the student made the mistake. The current COVE-ITS prototype does not create a model of the trainee’s mental state, and generally proceeds as if the cause of the error is the statistically most common one. This means that the advice the ITS is providing may not be addressing the trainee’s actual issue.
We believe that eyetracking can be used to improve the ITS’ model of the trainee’s mental state and thus provide more specific feedback which would improve the training. We have a conducted a small pilot study in which we compared the eye movements of shiphandlers with two levels of experience (expert shiphandlers and novices) during a COVE scenario to determine expertise differences in visual scan and mental model. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the two groups.
Keywords Eyetracking Intelligent Tutoring Systems Shiphandling Simulation Training
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal