Tracking and Assessing Learner Engagement Toolkit (TALENT)

The U.S. Air Force trains and educates a large and diverse workforce to meet requirements across a complex array of missions. Early-stage training in many Air Force Specialty Codes can consist of large corpora of foundational, static material, so training that motivates airmen is a necessary element in helping ensure a supply of qualified personnel in mission-critical areas like aerospace maintenance. Games and game-play can improve engagement in computer-mediated learning, but needed is the ability to measure motivation and engagement. Metrics are needed to (1) identify which techniques and approaches offer the greatest efficacy; (2) enable learning contexts that can adapt to detected lapses in engagement. Eduworks Corporation and the USC Institute for Creative Technology propose addressing this urgent need with the Tracking and Assessing Learner Engagement Toolkit (TALENT). TALENT combines Eduworks technologies for competency management, text analysis and adaptive tutoring with ICTs technologies for persistent learning, student modeling and adaptive recommendation. The result will provide both valid constructs and measures, and software tools to enable application of these metrics. TALENT will yield replicable and reliable metrics, providing persistent and unobtrusive assessments to enhance the Air Force training and education enterprise with adaptive support for learner engagement.