Charles River Analytics is developing an intelligent digital flashcard system to enhance military training and prepare warfighters. In recent pilot testing at US Marine Corps schoolhouses, participants noted the Marine Adaptive Schoolhouse Training with E-learning Repetition Technology (MASTERY) flashcard system’s ability to improve student preparedness and allow instructors to go deeper into course material. Following successful performance in earlier phases of the project, the Office of Naval Research awarded Charles River a $1.5M Sequential Phase II contract, which will allow the team to refine the user experience and fully integrate the platform into MarineNet, part of the Marine Corps’ internal eLearning ecosystem.
Rote learning is critical for developing the foundational knowledge that sailors and marines must acquire to perform effectively in their classifications and occupational specialties. They need intelligent study tools to help them memorize facts and details. Commercial digital flashcards are helpful for civilian education, but they are not secure or integrated with the Marine Corps’ education platform.
MASTERY provides military-level cybersecurity with convenient and secure access and integrates with the current Marine Corps’ education software, allowing instructors to easily create content from existing course material. The digital flashcards are supported by Charles River’s KWYN® artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which automatically implements learning science principles to help students better comprehend and retain information.
“We’ve worked on adaptive algorithms and making the algorithms flexible so that instructors can bring adaptive training to their courses without having to be experts in psychology to do it. For example, MASTERY decks intelligently fine-tune when a card will appear based on how well the student has learned it in the past,” said Dr. Spencer Lynn, Senior Scientist at Charles River Analytics and Principal Investigator on KWYN MASTERY. This adaptability, combined with ease of content ingestion, ensures that the system can be tailored to meet the specific needs of each instructor and student, enhancing its effectiveness and usability.
The goal is to accelerate knowledge acquisition and modernize the military’s training and education approaches. In previous phases of the project, the team successfully created a prototype that demonstrated the tool’s functionality. The recent funding will allow them to develop a minimum viable product for the Marine Corps. The team will focus on addressing bugs and implementing feature requests such as introducing multimedia flashcards, including performance metrics, and enabling new use cases such as homework and quizzes.
In the future, KWYN MASTERY could expand to all Marine Corps schoolhouses, wider Navy training programs, and other military training instances. Charles River Analytics is also able to create adaptive flashcard abilities for commercial customers.
A walkthrough of MASTERYs key features is available here.
Contact us to learn more about MASTERY and our other capabilities in adaptive intelligent training.
This material is based upon work supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under Contract No. N64267-24-C-0013. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ONR.
