Adaptive Training: Designing Adaptive Instructional Environments (Technical Report 1297)

This report on Designing Adaptive Instructional Environment: Insights from Empirical Evidence (PDF),  published by the United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, provides the results of an analysis of twenty research papers, which revealed several types of adaptive instructional procedures that show promise for beneficial effects in learning contexts. The recommendations should be of interest to designers and developers of technology-based training and education, particularly those involved in the implementation of Army Learning Concept 2015. The five adaptive techniques noted as the most likely to provide learning payoffs are: (1) Error-sensitive feedback, (2 ) Mastery Learning, (3) Adaptive spacing and repetition for drill-and-practice items, (4) Fading of worked examples for problem solving situations, or fading of demonstrations for behavioral tasks, and (5) Metacognitive prompting. (A copy of the Army Learning Concept 2015 publication is available as a PDF file from the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) site.)