The Development of a Testbed to Assess an Intelligent Tutoring System for Teams

Work has been ongoing to develop an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for teams. As part of this work, we are developing a flexible, scalable, military-based set of collaborative team tasks that can serve as a "testbed" to exercise various aspects of a team ITS architecture.Warfighting teams are a core part of any operation as individual soldiers combine their skill sets and plan, coordinate and act as one entity to accomplish assigned objectives. The team ITS test bed presented in this paper uses simple team tasks to train soldiers on basic functions including observation, target detection, target identification, communication within the team and decision making under stress. The testbed allows for manipulation of various dimensions of tutor feedback, learner work- load, and team size. The testbed enables researchers to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of different types of feedback on militarily-relevant training tasks.