You’re on a two-day patrol mission near an unknown village that might be hostile when your transport vehicle runs out of fuel. You can’t communicate with your headquarters element, but you know you need to act soon. What do you do?
Scenarios like these — known as situational judgment tests, or SJTs — may someday be used to help the Army improve soldiers’ ability to think on their feet and come up with better solutions to problems they might face in the field.
A recently begun two-year study by the University of Texas at Arlington, commissioned by the Army Research Institute, aims to provide insights on the value of SJTs for soldier development and training as well as where best to use them in the force for maximum effect.
SJTs are not a new concept; they’re a common feature on some screening tests for civilian hiring and used in medical school admissions tests. In 2021, the Air Force added SJT components to its promotion fitness examination for noncommissioned officers.
This new research for the Army is wide-ranging in terms of potential future application and notably will compare how well soldiers function in group scenarios with various collaboration and conflict dynamics versus how they manage on their own when thinking their way out of a complex challenge.
“We know a lot about how well [SJTs] work for hiring, but we don’t know as much about how well they work for training,” Michelle Martín-Raugh, a professor of Psychology at UTA and lead investigator on the study, said in an interview. “And so the goal of this project is to use these items in training to hopefully move the needle compared to other approaches that we more commonly use for training.”
The study will also specifically compare use of SJT scenarios with critical incident-based training, which is similarly scenario-based, but walks participants through the outcomes of certain decisions rather than asking them to select a course of action or rank choices.
These critical incident scenarios are more commonly used in military training, and Martín-Raugh said ARI officials expressed interest in running the “tried-and-true” approach against the potentially more challenging and engaging SJTs. Ingenuity, she said, was identified by officials as “something really important to train for in the military,” if challenging to develop and cultivate.
Work on the study, which began in September, is focusing first on crafting the scenarios used in testing.
“They’re all real examples that our subject matter experts are going to give us based on the situations that they’ve faced, so they’re definitely very realistic,” Martín-Raugh said.
Whether individual scenarios emphasize social challenges or task-based ones, ARI wants to emphasize prediction “performance in a resource-constrained environment,” she said.
“How can [soldiers] creatively complete the mission when the technology isn’t working, when they don’t have enough gas and they don’t have the right personnel — when there’s an issue with their team that’s interpersonal,” said Martín-Raugh. “How do they solve problems in these tough situations?”
The second year of the study will involve trials with a cohort of about 150 active-duty soldiers, she said, divided into five training groups. A control group won’t get any training; while the other groups will be divided between SJT and critical incident-based training, with and without social and technical limitations. It’s not clear yet where those soldiers will come from.
At the end of the study period, UTA will deliver a report on findings, along with all the training materials created by researchers, to the Army for next steps.
An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Orlandon Howard, told Military Times in an email that with research still in the beginning stages, it was too early to say where in training the service might implement SJT-based training. He added that a component of the UTA project was to identify which jobs and military occupational specialties were the best fit for this kind of training. It does appear that the service is looking beyond entry-level training in potential use for these tools, however.
“The research findings are expected to have applicability for enlisted soldiers and officers,” he said.
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