Enhancing Performance Under Stress: Stress Inoculation Training for Battlefield Airmen
Develop Measures to Support the Evaluation of Screening Tools and SIT
Download 339 Kb. View original pdf
|
| Develop Measures to Support the Evaluation of Screening Tools and SIT Currently accessible measures, such as attrition and training performance, are useful and informative but maybe deficient in determining the effectiveness of SIT. The Air Force should consider expanding measures of training performance to include peer and instructor ratings of other relevant training dimensions (e.g., stress tolerance, performance under stress, and decisionmaking under stress. The Army has made extensive use of peer ratings to support the screening and development of Special Forces. In addition to measuring performance under stress, steps should betaken to evaluate changes in physiological and psychological indicators of arousal when performing under stress. An excellent example using this approach is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center’s (FLETC) study (Atkins and Norris, 2004), which examined law enforcement trainees performance in a realistic simulation designed to induce stress Among the criteria measured, FLETC documented physiological values (i.e., heart rate, blood pressure, and salivary cortisol), psychological responses using self-report instruments of personality (e.g., anxiety, anger, depression, and curiosity, and performance evaluated by subject matter experts on several dimensions (e.g., perception, threat recognition, latency to respond, and performance skill scores such as shot accuracy. Similar measures have been used in other realistic scenario-based training (Taverniers et al., Additional measures expected to be affected by SIT would also include perceptions of combat readiness. These measures typically assess combat readiness using collective efficacy, or airmen’s beliefs about how successful the team will be in future combat. In fact, researchers recommend using combat readiness as a proxy measure for performance, because it has been significantly correlated with objective measures of performance (Thomas, Adler, and Castro, 2005). In addition to ensuring that relevant measures have been implemented, steps need to betaken to evaluate the effectiveness of SIT. The Air Force might consider implementing a pilot study to examine the relative effectiveness of SIT for improving training outcomes and operational performance. Such a pilot study could use an experimental design with matched groups (i.e., intervention and control groups) based on performance deficits under different stressors. Matching on performance deficits would be particularly important, since stress interventions have been shown to be more effective for those experiencing higher levels of distress at baseline (Flaxman and Bond, 2010). Download 339 Kb. Share with your friends:
|