A Method to Determine Optimal Simulator Training Time: Examining Performance Improvement Across the Learning Curve

Abstract

Training simulators have become an integral part of training programs across both military and non military domains. A pressing issue, however, is when and how the systems should be integrated into an existing training curriculum. Currently, time spent in simulator training is usually driven by availability of the simulator or the planned class curriculum, rather than by any type of systematic evaluation of the incremental learning that occurs across time. One reason for this may be the lack of methodologies for evaluating the optimal training time spent in simulators. To address this, a methodology is presented which utilizes a continuous evaluation of performance across trials to identify a “plateau” in learning improvements as represented by a learning curve.