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For Army noncommissioned officers (NCOs), attendance at each level of professional military education (PME) is a training requirement for career progression. Essentially, NCOs are required to attend schools and demonstrate professional acumen and mastery of a broad set of military skills to achieve promotion to the next higher grade. Historically, the Army has trained enlisted soldiers using an instruc- tor-centric, group-paced instructional approach, where soldiers are assessed on their ability to master tasks under specific conditions using explicit standards of performance.
Noncommissioned Officer Education System (NCOES) training centers and academies continue to offer training in what is, for the most part, a lock-step fashion, where the level of rigor and challenge is not tailored to the individual. Lock-step training can be beneficial for certain situations, but not all. For this reason, there is a need for innovation in the NCOES; it needs to change its approach to education. In spite of advances in educational technology, NCOES courses continue to train NCOs by relying too much on lock- step, instructor-led training, which is a dated approach to adult education.1
Self-Paced Instruction in Army Courses
The Army has from time to time used and con- ducted research on the effectiveness of self-paced instruction, more commonly known as self-paced learning (SPL), for certain courses, but self-paced ap- proaches have not been applied broadly in the NCOES. Unfortunately, much of the research is over 30 years old. One early study, by the Army Research Institute in 1975, was published as Analysis of a Self- Paced Instructional Program in the Clerical Field. 2 This study found that the use of self-paced instruction to train clerical personnel increased learner motivation and satisfaction among trainees. The study cited reductions in training time and required instructional support as benefits of self-paced instruction. Another Army Research Institute study, The Acquisition and Retention of Visual Aircraft Recognition Skills, published in 1976, concluded that self-pacing in training resulted in better trainee outcomes for higher aptitude trainees.3
If SPL was found to reduce overall training time while contributing to better training management in military schools in the 1970s, could this approach also work well in the distributed learning environment of the 21st century? Recent civilian and military studies of SPL suggest that self-paced NCOES courses could accelerate...