INTRODUCTIONIn aviation training, as in any training or educational program, whenever a student is having difficulties a decision must be made whether to drop or restore him to the program for another chance. In naval aviation training this decision is made by an administrative officer, or by a board of officers. An attempt is made to integrate the information -vailable on the past performance of the individual--his aptitude test scores, his grades and ratings, his interests, his judged motivation, et cetera --intoan accurate judgment of the student's probability of success if he is returned to the program. In naval aviation training quantitative information about the students accumulates rapidly; by the end of pre-flight school (the first 16 weeks) over thirty grades and scores are available on each student. The administrators who must make decisions about marginal students are soon embarrassed by the availability of more performance data than they can assimilate and integrate into a decision. In the past the problem has often been met by ignoring much of the information and basing judgment on two or three measures with which the administrators had the most familiarity or in which they had the most confidence.It seemed reasonable, however, that, if all of a student's valid past performance measures could be appropriately weighted and combined into a single statement of the probability of his success or failure, the decisions of the administrators concerning students might become more accurate. Knowledge of such probabilities should lead to the earlier dropping of men with high probabilities of later failure and the retention of men who have good chances to complete the program. This, in turn, should result in marked improvement in the efficiency with which the training facilities are used. These ideas and goals are not new; however, the development and pursuance of them became practical only after the acquisition of a high speed digital computer, approximately two years ago.
INITIAL PROCEDUREThe selection and training records of 820 non-officers and 766 officers who entered naval aviation training during calendar 1959 were used as the basic data. With the selection measures as the beginning a succession of inter-correlation matrices was computed. In conjunction with each inter-correlation matrix, the biserial correlations with pass/fail and pass/dropped at own request (DOR) dichotomies were computed for each variable. (Failure cases included flight failures, academic failures, and men dropped for disciplinary reasons.) At each point in training at which one or more additional variables became available a new matrix incorporating these variables was computed. Since the pre-flight training of non-officers and officers differs, separate sequences of matrices were computed. For each matrix the multiple correlations and the appropriate beta weights of the variables with the pass/fail and the pass/DOR criteria were computed separately using the Wherry-Doolittle method.The matrices, multiple correlations, and beta wei...
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