DISTRIBUTIONS OF AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS WORKLOAD

Abstract

Mental workload is a well-known concept with a long development history. It can be used to examine students’ attitudes at the end of the educational process and compare them in groups or separately. However, building a continuous workload profile across the range of task complexity increase is still an urgent issue. All four groups of methods used to define mental workload have such flaws for the workload profile construction process as significant time requirements, single value processing and post-processing of the received results. Only one of them can be used without modifications to construct the operator’s attitude chart (profile) regarding the workload range and it doesn’t operate with more reliable absolute values. To resolve this problem, a special workload assessment grid was developed, considering the advantages of a subjective group of methods and seven core characteristics. The reasoning for grid axes choice, threshold values, and question formulation were provided. Statistics were calculated for the full sample, different grades, and educational institutions. Comparison of the received responses with referential values, cross-comparison between institutions and different grades were performed. The results contribute to such important aspects of workload, as redlines, workload profiling, and operator’s comparison.