Abstract
Teams and teamwork are ubiquitous in military and civilian organizations. Their importance to organizational success cannot be overstated. This article describes the relationship and effect of three concepts: Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), shared mental models, and teamwork. The nexus between these concepts is examined to determine its capability to support adaptive instruction of teams, defined here as collectives of interdependent individuals who must communicate and interact with each other in order to perform assigned tasks and missions. An assumption underlying this examination is that augmenting the mental modeling processes of ITS with the mental models shared by members of interdependent teams will allow the considerable and increasingly research-established capabilities of intelligent tutoring of individuals to be applied in training teams. Specifically, we reviewed the learning and performance literature to identify how shared mental models of cognition could be used to enhance the adaptive instruction of teams. Our goal is to develop a methodology to enhance training and educational options for institutions that provide adaptive team instruction at the point-of-need. Toward this end, we discuss the adaptation of the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT), an open source tutoring architecture, to accommodate team models and states. While this article makes a first step toward defining a process for team tutoring, challenges remain. Team tutors must have the ability to manage uncertainty and the dynamic nature of team interaction and communication in order to make effective and timely decisions that optimize team and team member performance.
Highlights
We are evolving a concept that will enable Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to support adaptive instruction in collective tasks
We describe the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT), an open source architecture for authoring, delivering, managing, and evaluating ITS (Sottilare et al 2012). This description is followed by a discussion of GIFT and how it can contribute to team learning by capitalizing on the likely effectiveness of ITSs that apply both individual and shared mental models
More recently Cooke et al (2012) and Gorman (2014) have emphasized that these mental models should not be viewed as property or products, but as dynamic cognitive activities rooted in team member interactions and a meaningful context
Summary
We are evolving a concept that will enable Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to support adaptive instruction in collective tasks. The primary contribution of this article to artificial intelligence in education research and development is to suggest the synthesis of a process for developing and applying shared mental models of cognition to the adaptive instruction of collective tasks This process is a necessary precursor to nurturing the development and maintenance of shared mental models within ITSs. We provide a rudimentary discussion of issues and factors involved in the development and application of mental models used in adaptive training for interdependent teams. We describe the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT), an open source architecture for authoring, delivering, managing, and evaluating ITS (Sottilare et al 2012) This description is followed by a discussion of GIFT and how it can contribute to team learning by capitalizing on the likely effectiveness of ITSs that apply both individual and shared mental models. The article concludes by suggesting steps for research and development of these capabilities and the value of doing so
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