Situational judgment test for measuring military tactical decision-making skills

ABSTRACT

Situational Judgment Tests (SJT) have been used in assessing different constructs in many contexts, but there is no known SJT designed specifically for the military tactical level battle context. In this context, it is especially important that officers are able to act quickly even when experiencing stress and huge workload or confronted by unanticipated circumstances. Therefore, this study focuses on developing and testing an SJT for measuring military decision-making skills. The test was developed based on light infantry platoon-level tactical scenarios, where the potentially correct and incorrect test item options were created and evaluated by experts. Later, the test was validated empirically by collecting data from 80 conscripts and 134 cadets of the Estonian Defense Forces. IRT analysis was used to adapt the scoring key to empirical findings and to describe the quality of the test and its items. The empirical findings enabled us to specify the scores for different test item options. The follow-up analysis showed the test to have good reliability, difficulty level and discrimination of respondents. Also, test scores were found to be statistically significantly different for respondents with different levels of military experience and education, namely cadets and conscripts. The Mann-Whitney U test showed differences in the total test score and in making judgments in the initial and continuous problem situations. In conclusion, we found that the test can be used for assessing military decision-making in the infantry platoon-level battle situation context.

KEYWORDS:

• Situational judgment test
• item response theory
• conscripts
• cadets
• decision making

Acknowledgments

This research project is partly funded by the Estonian Ministry of Defense and carried out in cooperation between the Estonian Defense Forces, Estonian National Defense College, and the University of Tartu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.