Evaluated the effectiveness of the Common Core-the first phase of the U.S. Army's system for developing critical thinking skills in its officer corps-and the extent of differences among distributed, resident, and mixed-delivery course venues.

The U.S. Army s Command and General Staff School offers its Advanced Operations Course (AOC) for junior field-grade officers using both traditional resident instruction and a model referred to as blended distributed learning (BDL). This report assesses the effectiveness of AOC-BDL based on student and graduate surveys and identifies best practices for BDL from empirical research and case studies.