Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 103

TRANSFORMING TRAINING

The institutional domain, though, is where education
takes primacy. The Army University, a part of the institutional domain, has recently begun sweeping changes to
ensure courses across the Army are using evidence-based
practices for instruction and activities. However, these
changes can only be expected to have a small effect on
a leader’s development over the course of a career. For
example, an armor officer taking command of a battalion
has spent as few as twenty months in resident PME over
the course of the officer’s career up until that point (4.5
months in the Armor Basic Officer Leadership Course
[BOLC], 5.5 months in the Maneuver Captain’s Career
Course [MCCC], and ten months in the Command
and General Staff Officers’ Course).8 With less than two
out of seventeen years spent in PME, this institutional
education can hardly be expected to provide all necessary
knowledge for a battalion commander to win in the complex world described in the Army Operating Concept.
The majority of an officer’s career is spent in the
operational domain, so to have significant, meaningful
change in a person, a greater amount of education must
occur within this domain. The Army has devoted significant time and energy into creating doctrine on training
and education; however, none of the doctrinal or related
training or administrative publications addresses how
training in the operating force is to be designed.9 Several
tools are available for commanders to use as they create
training events, but almost all of them, to include the
Eight-Step Training Model, are focused primarily on the
resourcing of training, and they provide little guidance or
direction on the content.10 The U.S. Army CAC has recognized this problem, and published a white paper titled
“Enhancing Realistic Training.” The purpose of the paper
is to present an operational design for the development
and integration of efforts to enhance realistic training.11
The white paper is a very useful document in describing
what future training should consist of, especially as it
relates to the inclusion of all the complexities expected
on a future battlefield. What the paper is missing is a
description of how the training is to be designed. Taken at
face value, commanders could assume that when creating
a training event, they are expected to include all possible
complexities into the scenario because they will be exp ected to operate eventually in a complex world. Though
the Army also professes the “crawl, walk, run” model of
incrementally increasing the difficulty and complexity
of training, there is no doctrine to help a commander
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2016

create the conditions for a unit to progress in the complex
tasks described in the CAC white paper.12 Additionally,
the white paper references other joint and Army publications (such as doctrine, guidance, regulations, and
white papers) but does not include any academic work or
research in training and education. If the Army wants to
continue to develop soldiers and leaders in the operational domain while also preparing organizations to operate
in a complex world, it must use evidence-based practices
of the learning sciences to design training.

The Science of Learning
The science of learning is based on an understanding of how individuals and groups learn.13 The field
is now over one hundred years old, and it has gone
through several major shifts in that time. For the
purposes of this paper, the definition of learning used
is from Richard E. Mayer, a psychologist from the
University of Santa Barbara:
Learning is the relatively permanent change in
a person’s knowledge or behavior due to experience. This definition has three components: (1)
the duration of the
change is long-term
Capt. Andrew P.
rather than shortJenkins, U.S. Army, is a
term; (2) the locus of
student at the U.S. Army
the change is the conCommand and General
tent and structure of
Staff Officers Course,
knowledge in memoFort Leavenworth,
ry or the behavior of
Kansas. He holds a BA in
the learner; (3) the
history from Santa Clara
cause of the change is
University and an ME
the learner’s experiin learning design and
ence in the environtechnology from the
ment rather than
University of Southern
fatigue, motivation,
California. He was
drugs, physical condipreviously a tactics intion, or psychological
struction team chief and
14
intervention.
small group leader at
This definition allows us to
the Maneuver Captains
apply it to both individual
Career Course, and he
and organizational outhas deployed to Iraq
comes. Whenever we train,
and Afghanistan. Jenkins
we expect that trainees
won the 2016 DePuy
will come out of the event
Special Topics Writing
changed (hopefully for the
Competition with
better), that the change
this article.
101