For Sailors who will be serving in the Gunner’s Mate (GM) rating, the first stop after Recruit training is the Center for Surface Combat Systems (CSCS) at Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois. Here, Sailors in several ratings, including Gunner’s Mate, take part in the Apprentice Technical Training (ATT) School to learn the fundamentals of electricity and electronics equipment before beginning more rating-specific courses in a Class “A” Technical School.
Developed as part of the Revolution in Training, the Great Lakes’ ATT School was the first Navywide computer-based training (CBT) system, and was soon available for over twenty different ratings. In addition to the program at Great Lakes, ATT is offered at Naval training schools in San Diego, Pensacola, Groton (Connecticut), and Kings Bay (Georgia). In the period between the introduction of the ATT School in 2004 and 2006, over 20,000 Sailors had completed the course at the four locations.
Computer-based training offered advantages over traditional on-site education, such as larger class sizes and the ability for students to progress at their own pace, and the system was extended for use in the Class “A” schools for ratings such as Gunner’s Mate, Fire Controlman (FC), Operation Specialist (OS), Interior Communication (IC), Electronic Technician (ET), and Quartermaster (QM).
But a Human Performance Requirements Review conducted by the CSCS in 2011 revealed that while the computer-based training worked well in the ATT schools where theoretical principles were the focus, the CBT systems weren’t nearly as effective when they made up the lion’s share of the training at the Class “A” school for GM Sailors and other ratings. Simply put, Gunner’s Mates were arriving at their first assignments lacking ability to perform rudiementary maintenance tasks. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t understand how systems worked; it was that they lacked a significant amount of experience of putting the theories of troubleshooting they’d learned into actual practice.
To address the issue, CSCS began to move away from an individual learning paradigm and replaced CBT with a more traditional system of classroom education, training labs, and simulations. The results were immediate and impressive: between October 2012 and May 2013, average overall test scores in a six ratings, including Gunner’s Mate, increased from 87 percent to over 92 percent.
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