Evaluation of performance in emergency response scenarios: a virtual environment skill retention study

Abstract

The research described in this thesis investigates the longitudinal retention of skills attained by naïve subjects who had completed a virtual induction training. This work is a continuation of the original induction training conducted by Smith & Veitch (2017, 2018). The original induction training introduced participants to a “virtual offshore platform” where they were taught basic safety and egress procedures. After a period of 6 to 9 months, the participants were re-exposed to the virtual environment and tested again. The researcher has hypothesized that participants will demonstrate skill fade over this period, and there will be a difference in repeated measures between exposures. Retention of key concepts were evaluated to determine where skill fade was most prominent, and the amount of retraining required to bring participants back to competency was recorded. The experimental results demonstrated that skill fade was most prominent in foundational testing scenarios where participants were first re-exposed to each learning objective. Further, the results indicated that the participants were quickly re-trained to post training competency after initial re-exposure to the environment. The findings of the experiment support the research hypothesis.