Performance Assessment for the Workplace Volume I (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-14
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The emphasis is on giving pupils the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do, rather than how well they can answer questions about a subject. As the title of this book indicates, performance assessment has also come to the workplace.
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Initiated by the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1980 and scheduled for completion in 1992, the JPM Project represents an investment of many millions of dollars and involved the participation of thousands of people—from the measurement specialists who designed the performance tests to the local base personnel who provided logistical support for the data collection and the more than 15,000 troops who supplied the performance data.
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It does not present a detailed analysis of the performance data, leaving that to the research teams that carried out the work. We have tried to place the technical discussions concerning the development of performance measures within a larger policy context, providing in Chapter 1 a historical introduction to the criterion problem and sketching in Chapter 2 the many and often competing forces that influence personnel selection in the military.
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More to the point, both Congress and DoD policy officials wanted to know how the induction of so many people who should have failed to qualify was affecting job performance. Initial attempts to address the question revealed that the relation between ASVAB scores and satisfactory performance in military jobs was more assumed than empirically established (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense Manpower, Reserve Affairs, and Logistics, 1981; Maier and Hiatt, 1984~.
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Because of the superior measures of performance, constructed with a care normally reserved for standardized tests used as predictors, these results provide a solid base for general conclusions formerly based on less satisfactory criteria. This overview reviews the project briefly, emphasizing those aspects that seem particularly noteworthy, either in illuminating special accomplishments of interest to policy makers or technical experts, or in posing challenges to the technical community.
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For several reasons, trait analysis did not play a major role in the JPM Project. Traditional task analysis complemented the desire to stay as close as possible to concrete job performance.
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What is a Task? The JPM Project is highly unusual in having applied classical test construction methods to the development of criterion measures.
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The committee felt strongly that a domain-referenced approach would have been more appropriate to the long-term goal of the JPM Project, which was not simply to validate the ASVAB, but to link enlistment standards to job performance. The argument for this position is laid out in Chapter 9 and in Green and Wigdor (Vol.
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There are two schools of thought on selecting tasks: one adheres to purposive sampling, by which job experts choose the tasks to be included, while the other calls for random sampling. It was the committee's position that, all things considered, a stratified random sampling approach would put the project on stronger ground scientifically; it is the only approach that allows one to make, with known margins of error, statements that can be generalized to the entire domain of tasks in a job.
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EVALUATION: THE QUALITY OF THE PERFORMANCE MEASURES Because hands-on tests have been so little tried in the past, it was not clear that the assessment method would produce measurements of sufficient stability and relevance to be meaningful psychometrically. Moreover, the hands-on format called for creative twists on standard procedure in reliability and validity analysis.
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For example, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, an ASVAB composite that measures general ability, can predict performance in all of the jobs studied, but better prediction can be achieved in most jobs by using different combinations of test scores from the battery. Another general trend, one that had been anticipated, was the somewhat higher correlation between the entrance tests and the job -- cow - Iknowledge performance measure than between the entrance tests and handson measures.
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Phase I of the JPM Project has demonstrated that reasonably high-quality measures of job performance can be developed, and that the relationships between these measures and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery are strong enough to justify its use in setting enlistment standards. But the human resource management problem is not solved by showing that recruits who score well on the ASVAB tend to score well on hands-on performance measures.
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If the JPM performance data can be successfully incorporated into trade-off models, the models will offer policy officials useful tools for estimating the probable effects on performance and/or costs of various scenarios—say a 10 percent reduction in recruiting budgets, a 20 percent reduction in force, or a downturn in the economy. Although the solutions provided by such models are not intended to and will not supplant the overarching judgment that policy officials must bring to bear, they can challenge conventional assumptions and inject a solid core of empirical evidence into the decision process.
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