What’s Wrong with this Picture? Video-Annotation with Expert-Model Feedback as a Method of Accelerating Novices’ Situation Awareness

This paper describes a computer-based training method in which novice learners view video clips of authentic performance situations and annotate the video clips by describing critical incidents that they observe in the video clips and noting the time code where the incident occurs. Experts’ observations about the same video clips are offered to learners as expert-model feedback. Learners work to align their observations with those of experts. After annotating multiple video clips and comparing their observations with those of experts, learners increasingly “see” situations more like experts do. This method of videoannotation with expert-model feedback is a form of expertise-based training (XBT). The XBT approach seeks to accelerate the development of expert-like schema using representative tasks that involve recall, detection, categorization, and prediction—the cognitive sub-skills underlying the situation awareness that is often associated with expert performance. XBT was first implemented in the context of high-speed sports such as baseball, football, and tennis, but can also be applied in more traditionally cognitive domains. The research study reported in this paper provides an example of the XBT method of video-annotation with expert-model feedback being used to accelerate the classroom awareness of teacher education students. The teacher education project is used both to demonstrate the feasibility of the method and also to reveal instructional design issues related to video-annotation with expert-model feedback. The method potentially provides a way to accelerate situation awareness in security, law enforcement, emergency response, and other domains—especially those in which authentic situational video is available for instructional purposes.