Developing Interoperable Data for Training Effectiveness Assessment in Army Marksmanship Training

As Army training budgets become more limited, a renewed focus has been placed on simulation-based training to maintain Soldier readiness. While simulation-based systems have long been leveraged by the Army as part of the continuum of Soldier training, their effectiveness is not often reliably assessed. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO, 2013) found that neither the Army nor the Marine Corps sufficiently assess the effectiveness of their simulation training systems. One barrier to conducting this assessment is the inability to leverage objective metrics of Soldier performance within simulation-based and live marksmanship training to optimize training outcomes. This paper discusses the foundational research being conducted to develop an architecture that will allow metrics for marksmanship training collected using the Experience API (xAPI) format, to support training effectiveness analysis, adaptive training systems, and training resource management.