Research Summaries

Back Officer of the Deck Competency Data Collection and Analysis

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Cunha, Jesse M.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Recent ship collisions/groundings have resulted in an increased organizational focus by the U.S. Navy on the development and tracking of Mariner's Skills as a key subset of overall Surface Warfare competency. Recognizing the lack of readily available data on the operational experience of Officers of the Deck (OODs), the Surface Warfare Officer's School (SWOS) administered a series of assessments to a randomly-selected sample of OODs from various homeports and ship types. The assessments included both written exams and a practical shiphandling exercise in a simulator. Preliminary analysis of the data shows that officers with more underway experience tended to perform better, but SWOS recognizes that more sophisticated statistical and machine learning analyses of the data will likely yield further insights into the predictors of shiphandling ability. The ultimate goal of this research effort will be to use the insights gained from the analysis of existing data to develop an optimal data collection system that tracks and predicts the ability of individual ODDs.

Research Objectives:
1) An analysis of the existing data collected by SWOS on OODs shiphandling ability and experience, which will help inform; 2) an understanding of which metrics would best be most useful in summarizing individual’s and unit’s shiphandling proficiency.; 3) An exploration of how to continuously collect, analyze, and disseminate this data Fleet-wide, both for immediate operational decisions onboard ships and for long-range staffing decisions.

Deliverables will include: an NPS Technical Report documenting our findings, an NPS Master’s Thesis by the student researcher, and a set of briefing slides that can be circulated to key Navy stakeholders.
Keywords
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