Step 3: Adult-Centered Implementation
Assessment - Provide Individual Assessment of Skills, Interests, and Learning Outcomes
Assessments are useful at both the start and the end of any learning initiative because they can:
- Help determine the placement of a student within a program
- Determine career and advancement interests and goals
- Determine the student’s support service needs
- Determine strengths and weaknesses
- Inform curriculum development and instruction
- Measure learning gains (Henle et al, 2005)
The National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth, Institute for Educational Leadership has defined four different (yet often overlapping) categories of assessment: educational, vocational, psychological and medical. Educational assessments measure academic performance and cognitive ability. Psychological assessments measure cognitive ability, behavior, and social/emotional health. Vocational assessments measure employment-related interests, goals and values; vocational aptitude (or the ability or potential to learn or perform in order to hold certain jobs or train for those careers). Medical assessments, of course, measure a person’s physical or functional capacity to physically perform in certain situations. The tables, reprinted from the NCWDY’s guidebook on assessments, Career planning begins with assessment: A guide for professionals serving youth with educational & career development challenges (Timmons, Podmostko, Bremer, Lavin & Wills, 2004), provides a useful framework for understanding the purpose of different kinds of assessments.
The challenge is determining which assessment, or combination of assessments, is going to collect all of the information that is needed for good educational and career planning, placement of students within the learning initiative, verifying learning outcomes and conferring degrees and credentials that are meaningful.
Important factors to consider include:
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Reliability – the ability of the test to have consistent results over time
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Fairness – or absence of test bias against certain groups of individuals
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Validity – whether the test is measuring what it purports to measure
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Cost
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Time to administer and score
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Qualifications of the test administrator
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Ease of use
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Reporting format – the results should be presented in an understandable way
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Appropriateness to the individual’s cognitive functioning level, reading ability, math ability, and level of career development. (Timmons et al, 2004)
There may be no single assessment that will meet all of your needs, particularly for thorough education and career planning. For example, ACT’s WorkKeys has gained popularity because it links job profiling with individual assessment of basic skills, it has been used to assess general employability (see the innovation of Work Readiness Credential below), it provides related curriculum to build the skills, and it is relatively easy to administer. However, it does not assess vocational interests. So for career planning purposes, WorkKeys might be paired with an assessment specifically designed to assess career and vocational interests.
The National Collaborative on Workforce & Disability for Youth’s (NCWDY) guidebook, Career planning begins with assessment: A guide for professionals serving youth with educational & career development challenges (Timmons et al, 2004), provides information on a wide range of published assessments available for different purposes, along with information such about reliability, validity, reporting format, ease of use, target population, and so on. An online version of the guidebook can be downloaded at www.ncwd-youth.info/assets/guides/assessment/AssessGuideComplete.pdf. Some of these assessments may be standard offerings through community colleges.
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Related Organizational Example