The Workload Assessment and Learning Effective Associated with Truck Driving Training Courses

Present study examined the workload and applied the theory of learning curve to evaluate the learning effective for training of driving courses. The trainees’ workloads were assessed by the NASA-TLX twice, one on the 10th and the other on the last (28th) practice. Forty healthy male solders with an average age 23.2 years participated in this study, and a HINO 10.5T trunk was used for training in a standard training field. Five driving tasks evaluated were “going up and down a hill (up/down hill)”, “three-point turn on a narrow road (3-point turn)”, “moving forward and backward on an S curve (S-curve)”, “reversing the car into a garage (reversing-into-garage)”, and “parallel parking”. For learning cures, the values of among 40 participants were averaged within each practice for each task, and the overall Wright’s learning curves model for each driving task was fitted. Results showed all R2s were significantly high with a range of 0.88–0.97. This implied that these learning curves of trunk driving tasks were able to be fitted by power function very well. Specifically, the learning rate was 0.9162 for up/down hill, 0.8912 for 3-point turn, 0.8802 for parallel parking, 0.8736 for reversing-into-garage, and 0.8698 for S-curve. For workload, the results indicated that the second measure (on 28th practice) was lower than the first measure (on 10th practice) for all evaluated tasks. This implied that practice was also able to reduce the overall workloads. Additionally for the task effect, S-curve task had the highest workload, 3-point-turn task had the lightest workload, and the rest three were not significantly different from each other. After practices, there were more reduction in workload for the tasks of S-curve, reversing-into-garage, and parallel parking.