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Defining Situation Awareness in a Military Aviation Training Community: Theoretical and Practical Implications for Training

In military aviation, situation awareness (SA) is evaluated on nearly every training event because of its criticality to mission success. However, evaluations generally entail global assessments that allow little standardization or diagnostic feedback to be provided. It is clear that one of the challenges facing instructors and training practitioners is that SA is not well defined. Moreover, despite recent theoretical work, there is little direction from the literature regarding how to provide practice and feedback on SA in an operational environment: The major consequences of this are weak and inconsistent translations of SA into training products (e.g., measurable training objectives) and curricula. The focus of this symposium is how this translation is being made in one military aviation community. The impetus for the present symposium was borne from work surrounding the reorganization of the training curriculum in a military training command at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Despite the emphasis on SA by the training command, the reorganization was hampered in the area of SA because of poorly defined training objectives, preventing the further production of training products. In response, a research effort was organized in which training theory drove the collection of a variety of data to help solve this problem. Data included behavioral evaluations conducted on actual training flights, survey data in which the difficulty and criticality of SA, and assessment of instructor mental models of SA. The use of a multidisciplinary team, which included scientists from the government, industry, and academia, was conducive for the planning of this research and for envisioning how these data would be used to affect training products. The present symposium consists of a collection of four papers that report on various aspects of this work. The resulting papers range from theoretical to highly applied, yet each stresses the links that can exist between training theory and training practice. The first paper presents a framework for the research conducted and outlines the key issues: SA construct definition, measurement and training. The second paper applies an eventbased approach to assessment of SA. This approach, developed for use in a laboratory setting, was applied to a highly dynamic environment of actual training flights. The third paper, which has the greatest theoretical orientation, focuses on the assessment of instructors’ knowledge structures of SA concepts and the implications for training. Finally, the fourth paper has the most applied orientation. It discusses how these varieties of data can be used to impact products and processes utilized as part of the traditional instructional systems development (ISD) process.