Study 3: Instructional design linking military training and academic education for officer cadets: A scoping review

As complexity intensifies, strategic thinking (i.e. academic education) becomes increasingly important for officer cadets, necessitating expanding academic education programs within the military academy context. For officer education, several efforts have been made to close the gap between traditional military training of skills and the relatively new academic education programs. Until now, little attention has been paid to instructional design as a means of linking military training and academic education within a military academy context.

Consequently, we made a plea for an innovative integrated instructional design model that meets the needs of both military training and academic education, based on an instructional design model for military training and an instructional design model for academic education. For this purpose, we selected the Nine events of instruction model and the STAR Legacy model respectively. The Nine events of instruction model is since the second world war the typical instructional design model for military skills training, where these nine events include gaining attention, informing of the learning objectives, stimulating recall of prior learning, presenting the content, providing learning guidance, eliciting performance, providing feedback, assessing performance, enhancing retention and transfer.

On the other hand, the STAR Legacy model is a meticulously structured instructional design model centered on learning objectives for academic education, grounded in the constructivist educational perspective, wherein students collaboratively engage in solving authentic, complex problems. This projected integrated instructional design model aims to provide military trainers and academic educators common ground (i.e. educational language and methods) in order to encourage collaboration.

Prior to designing the integrated model, it was considered essential to ascertain that the two selected instructional design models had not previously been integrated. Our scoping review confirmed that the two selected models had not yet been combined at that moment.

Methods

Scoping review.

Data description

Publications included in the scoping review.