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Current Army doctrine stresses a need for military leaders to have the capability to make flexible and adaptive decisions based on a future unknown environment, location and enemy. To assess a military decision maker’s ability in this context, this paper aims to modify the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test which assesses cognitive flexibility, into a military relevant map task. Thirty-four military officers from all service branches completed the map task.

The purpose of this study was to modify a current psychological task that measures cognitive flexibility into a military relevant task that includes the challenge of overcoming experiential bias, and understand underlying causes of individual variability in the decision-making and cognitive flexibility behavior of active duty military officers on this task.

Results indicated that non-perseverative errors were a strong predictor of cognitive flexibility performance on the map task. Decomposition of non-perseverative error into efficient errors and random errors revealed that participants who did not complete the map task changed their sorting strategy too soon within a series, resulting in a high quantity of random errors.

This study serves as the first step in customizing cognitive psychological tests for a military purpose and understanding why some military participants show poor cognitive flexibility.

This research develops a data-driven statistical model capable of predicting a US Army Reserve (USAR) unit staffing levels based on unit location demographics. This model provides decision makers an assessment of a proposed station location’s ability to support a unit’s personnel requirements from the local population.

This research first develops an allocation method to overcome challenges caused by overlapping unit boundaries to prevent over-counting the population. Once populations are accurately allocated to each location, we then then develop and compare the performance of statistical models to estimate a location’s likelihood of meeting staffing requirements.

This research finds that local demographic factors prove essential to a location’s ability to meet staffing requirements. We recommend that the USAR and US Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) use the logistic regression model developed here to support USAR unit stationing decisions; this should improve the ability of units to achieve required staffing levels.

This research meets a direct request from the USAREC, in conjunction with the USAR, for assistance in developing models to aid decision makers during the unit stationing process.

This paper aims to use a data-driven approach to identify the factors and metrics that provide the best indicators of academic attrition in the Korean language program at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.

This research develops logistic regression models to aid in the identification of at-risk students in the Defense Language Institute’s Korean language school.

The results from this research demonstrates that this methodology can detect significant factors and metrics that identify students at-risk. Additionally, this research shows that school policy changes can be detected using logistic regression models and stepwise regression.

This research represents a real-world application of logistic regression modeling methods applied to the problem of identifying at-risk students for the purpose of academic intervention or other negative outcomes. By using logistic regression, the authors are able to gain a greater understanding of the problem and identify statistically significant predictors of student attrition that they believe can be converted into meaningful policy change.