Interpersonal and Leadership Skills: Using Virtual Humans to Teach New Officers

Because Officers are charged with counseling and mentoring their subordinates, successful leaders in the United States Army must possess strong interpersonal skills (Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2006, 2008, 2011). Most Officers, however, develop their interpersonal skills on the job. Further, what formal training they receive consists primarily of live role-play sessions, which can fail to provide consistent practice, effective feedback, or accurate skill assessment and improvement. To address these issues, we have created a virtual-human-based roleplaying environment. The Virtual Officer Leadership Trainer (VOLT) is a controlled practice environment that allows instructor management and facilitates throughput. Trainees learn interpersonal skills, see demonstrations of the skills being used correctly, and then practice the skills interacting with a virtual human via branching, scripted dialogue that allows the trainee to apply specific skills. The trainees in the classroom observe this interaction in real time. At each decision point in the interaction, trainees use personal response systems (“clickers”) to indicate what they believe to be the correct course of action. These data are available to an instructor who monitors the class’s performance and conducts an after-action review. VOLT thus allows an entire class to participate in a single roleplay exercise, stimulating discussion, and facilitating peer and instructor evaluation in real time. VOLT’s instructional design is based on cognitive task analyses with expert leaders, which identified a set of learning objectives. This paper discusses VOLT’s educational goals, instructional design, technological approach, and program evaluation plan.