Questions Submitted and Government Responses (16 September 2021).pdf

Questions Submitted & Government Responses (W911NF-18-S-0005-FY21-05)

Q1: Is there a specific use case in mind that you can provide to better shape our solution?

A1: Our overall intent is to develop an array of potential solutions for piecemeal application. These solutions would be individually selected and ordered to enhance self-regulation competency development under specific contexts and could look very different when applied in different situations. The available resources may limit the completeness of our solutions for all potential use cases, yet our goal is to cover sufficient breadth to provide a more detailed rationale for progressively elaborating this research area into more specific occupational situations. A few potential scenarios that suggest a combination of cognitive, behavioral, and environmental self-regulation adaptations would be:

- A highly intelligent, creative, and sensitive Recruit is provided the cognitive and emotional skills for a first enlistment in an occupation that will be characterized by tedium, rote learning, minimal responsibility, and simplistic tasks.

- An Infantry Lieutenant who exhibits inappropriate emotional reactivity and attentional focus toward unhelpful factors during highly complex and challenging situations is retrained to use more adaptive cognitive processes.

- A Soldier exhibiting talent in cyber warfare is stunted by irrational fear and avoidance of academic learning so is trained to self-monitor and engage more adaptive emotions and focusing behaviors during classroom learning and testing.

- A deployed Soldier’s performance severely degrades as s/he withdraws from other people in the unit due to unresolvable personal problems back home so is trained to address internal resistance factors and employ social skills to enable more adaptive reliance on peers and leaders to help cope with intractable personal problems.

Q2: Would the government be willing and able to provide access to subject matter experts for interviewing?

A2: Yes, we are willing to facilitate access to subject matter experts (SMEs) as required by a proposed protocol. Importantly, we have already initiated some work in this area (effort ongoing), so similar proposed activities that complement, complete, and expand upon existing data and concepts would be our goal as we shape the protocol (post award).

Q3: Would the government be able to assist with finding and facilitating pilot opportunities with end users?

A3: ARI prioritizes research that transitions products to end user populations. To that end, we engage with multiple Army institutions that seek solutions to problems that fit within our mission scope in order to provide appropriate science-based tools for use by end-user communities.

Q4: To what extent would you value working with junior leaders specifically in development and testing of self-regulatory assessments and feedback rather than a comparable population?

A4: We are specifically interested (but not exclusively; see A5) in developing formative tools for junior leaders, NCOs, and officers that would enhance learning speed and quality for leadership-related self-regulation competencies that enhance job performance.

Q5: Is it preferred that all development involve Army junior leaders, that findings are verified with subsamples of Army junior leaders to verify generalizability, or is verification with junior leader populations out of scope considering the expected versatility of the products across relevant contexts and ability to individualize self-regulation strategies (so that differences in populations are inherently accounted for)?

A5: It is our view that successful junior leaders use competencies formed at subordinate levels to acquire the more developmentally advanced self-regulation skills typically associated with leadership. However, we acknowledge that contexts vary between military occupations and experiences, which imply more specific self-regulation strategies that may interfere with their generalizability and versatility across the full spectrum of Army occupations. We recommend a flexible approach that prioritizes the more critical aspects of mission accomplishment that, along with their unique self-regulation strategies, promote success within a few distinct types of military occupations. In these cases, generalizability and versatility is subordinate to the criticality of the skill in accomplishing the mission under combat-relevant high-stakes challenges. As part of our intent to transition our tools to the Army, we would seek to validate our self-regulation tools within the intended populations.

Q6: Would ARI able to help coordinate participant recruitment of junior leaders?

A6: Yes, we have several relationships with potential recruitment pools that could provide junior leader participants and we would be willing to utilize these as populations, relative to the potential value to the end user.

Again, thank you for your interest in this proposed research.