The Effect of Brief Situational Awareness Training in a Police Shooting Simulator: An Experimental Study

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of situational awareness (SA) training in a shooting simulator. Forty 1st-year students from the Norwegian Police University College participated in this study. They were divided into 2 groups and matched with respect to sex and previous weapon experience. The SA-trained group received scenario-based training with freeze technique and reflection based on the

Evaluation of the New York City Police Department Firearm Training and Firearm-Discharge Review Process

“…Our assessment of the quality of training is based on information gathered in the following three ways: review of the literature on police training (see, for comparison, Bennell and Jones, 2005;Helsen and Starkes, 1999;Morrison and Vila, 1998;Saus et al, 2006) review of the training materials provided by the NYPD, including lesson plans, tests, and evaluation forms from the hands-on workshops and lessons observations of a number of workshops and lessons in the skills and abilities term, including stop, question, and frisk; car stop; ground tactics; firearm retention; straight-baton lessons; basic tactical firearm training; situational simulations (i.e., scenario-based training) using the Meggitt FATS simulator; the tactical house; the tactical village with Simunition systems; and the mock-precinct exercises). Also, for comparison, we observed firearm and tactical training at two large police departments and one large sheriff's department in other cities.…”

Comparative study of three training methods for enhancing process control performance: Emphasis shift training, situation awareness training, and drill and practice

“…However, Saus et al (2006) have found empirical evidence substantiating the effects of the SA training Table 1 Comparison of emphasis shift training, situation awareness training, and drill and practice.…”

“…Emphasis shift training (Gopher, 2007;Gopher et al, 1989) Situation awareness training (Endsley and Robertson 2000;Saus et al, 2006) Drill and practice (Carlson et al, 1989;Ericsson et al, 1993) Rationale Learning through priority changes on subcomponents of a whole task Learning through randomized ''freezing" of a task with situation awareness questions and debriefing they designed for students of a police university on the basis of a ''freezing" technique coupled with debriefing. This approach calls for randomly stopping, or freezing, a simulated task, posing the participant questions about the three levels of SA (Endsley, 1995b), then debriefing the individual.…”

“…Because little is known about either SA training or the attendant retention intervals, we also investigate both matters in this study. Explanations for the effectiveness of SA training are that it improves the ability to make timely and effective decisions and to anticipate events (Saus et al, 2006). In addition, SA training facilitates the construction of mental models that improve the understanding of both the importance of various situations and the resources relating to them (Endsley & Robertson, 2000).…”

“…This procedure, known as ''double manipulation," has been shown to optimize EST (Gopher et al, 1989). In the EST/SA training, EST was supplemented by SA training based on the freezing-and-debriefing technique (see Saus et al, 2006). We used a simulated multitask environment that corresponded to a process control environment.…”