Alexandra K. Wigdor – författare

Declining American competitiveness in world economic markets has renewed interest in employment testing as a way of putting the right workers in the right jobs. A new study of the U.S. Department of Labor''s General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) Referral System sheds light on key questions for America''s employers: How well does the GATB predict job success? Are there scientific justifications for adjusting minority test scores? Will increased use of the GATB result in substantial increases in productivity?

Fairness in Employment Testing evaluates both the validity generalization techniques used to justify the use of the GATB across the spectrum of U.S. jobs and the policy of adjusting test scores to promote equal opportunity.

"Pay for performance" has become a buzzword for the 1990s, as U.S. organizations seek ways to boost employee productivity. The new emphasis on performance appraisal and merit pay calls for a thorough examination of their effectiveness. Pay for Performance is the best resource to date on the issues of whether these concepts work and how they can be applied most effectively in the workplace.

This important book looks at performance appraisal and pay practices in the private sector and describes whether—and how—private industry experience is relevant to federal pay reform. It focuses on the needs of the federal government, exploring how the federal pay system evolved; available evidence on federal employee attitudes toward their work, their pay, and their reputation with the public; and the complicating and pervasive factor of politics.

Volume II covers a number of measurement and analytical issues in greater technical detail, including: range restriction adjustments, methods for evaluating multiple sources of error in measurement, comparing alternative measures of performance, and strategies for clustering military occupations.

Although ability testing has been an American preoccupation since the 1920s, comparatively little systematic attention has been paid to understanding and measuring the kinds of human performance that tests are commonly used to predict—such as success at school or work. Now, a sustained, large-scale effort has been made to develop measures that are very close to actual performance on the job. The four military services have carried out an ambitious study, called the Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards (JPM) Project, that brings new sophistication to the measurement of performance in work settings.

Volume 1 analyzes the JPM experience in the context of human resource management policy in the military. Beginning with a historical overview of the criterion problem, it looks closely at substantive and methodological issues in criterion research suggested by the project: the development of performance measures; sampling, logistical, and standardization problems; evaluating the reliability and content representativeness of performance measures; and the relationship between predictor scores and performance measures—valuable information that can also be useful in the civilian workplace.