- Paul MaudDib
- May 3, 2006
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TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE
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Goons. Man.
Show me an objective method that I can implement that will reliably sort the most productive people from a pool of candidates based only on what I can observe before employment and I will never again hire on the basis of a recommendation. I am 100% on board with getting the best possible people to work for me.
They can be created if there is a desire for them to exist. There isn't.
There's generalized tests, like the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, but there are also more specific tests designed to handle aptitude at a specific task, like the Hi-level Language Aptitude Battery. The way you design a test is you narrow in on the specific aptitudes required to perform a job well and you come up with some tasks that also require those aptitudes which can be done in a preliminary test.
quote:
Scientists who study second language acquisition have long been fascinated by the difficulty that adults have in becoming native-like in a language they begin learning after puberty. Most adults have no problem picking up modest amounts of vocabulary and grammar, assuming they’re motivated to put in sustained effort. But to become highly skilled in a second language, simply devoting the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell made famous in Outliers isn’t enough. It turns out that a person needs high-performing cognitive hardware, too.
But in the last 30 years, thanks to the work of Alan Baddeley and Peter Skehan, among others, research on language learning showed that to really master a second language, many of the same cognitive abilities that were used in native language learning were needed. Starting in the 1970s, Baddeley devised the notion of working memory, showing how it was the crucial mechanism in a range of mental tasks. Then, in the 1980s and 90s, linguist Skehan proposed a theory of second language acquisition based on general cognitive abilities, such as working memory, pattern recognition, and the information-processing capacity of the brain, which would include implicit learning and associative memory. At a time when aptitude research had fallen by the wayside, Skehan’s ideas opened new doors for understanding what made language learners tick.
This is the some of the science that CASL researchers drew on when they built a theoretical model of the cognitive components of language learning aptitude. But even with the theory in hand, they had to test it against the skills and abilities of real language learners. Fortunately, as part of the Washington language establishment, the CASL researchers had access to many talented language learners. Once those learners were identified, the researchers classified them according to the abilities that the theory of aptitude said they’d have.
...
Hoping to see Cole’s traits writ large, in 2011, CASL researchers assembled a group of around 500 employees from federal agencies who were like him. That meant they had high levels of proficiency in a language they’d begun learning as an adult.
They were given a series of tasks to test their memory, ability to focus, and sensitivity to language sounds. On the first task, subjects listened to a series of consonants, with three presented every second, and had to recall the last six consonants they heard, testing their working memory. In a related task, which also tested working memory, they were shown a series of one or two syllable-length nonsense words, then they were prompted with another set of words and had to immediately indicate whether or not the items in the second set had been present in the first. At the time, neither subjects nor researchers knew how central the results of these working memory tasks would be to measuring high-level aptitude.
Another task that proved important was a test of associative memory, or how well someone links new information to what they already know. Subjects learned 20 pairs of words, one English and the other in nonsense language. Several minutes later, they were presented with the nonsense word and had to type its corresponding English word. At the outset, researchers suspected that associative memory would prove to be important, as it had been included in the aptitude tests of the 1950s.
Next was a set of tasks that measured a person’s ability to filter out noise and deal with distraction, such as throwing in an unrelated visual cue and seeing if the person could inhibit the impulse to look. Next, subjects heard a list of five words, then saw two other words that were synonyms with words on the list; they had to select which word corresponded with the largest number of words. The time it took to make a selection was measured, as was whether or not a person chose correctly. This was a test of a person’s long-term memory.
Subjects were then asked to learn sequences of patterns made by an asterisk that appears in one of four boxes as well as discern speech vocalizations that sound the same to most English speakers. For example, they were asked to distinguish between two consonants in Hindi that, to English speakers, sound the same. There was another test involving two sounds from Russian. The researchers could have used sounds from languages other than Hindi or Russian, but the goal was to see whether people could pick up subtle sound differences despite their English-speaking background. One might think that listening abilities would be a central part of high-level learning, but the results eventually showed otherwise.
You can really break pretty much any task out into similar sub-tasks, and if you get rid of the language-specific stuff then simply re-using this test would probably work well on a large variety of high-skilled tasks. For example working memory is one of the foundations of most creative tasks (including technical-creative engineering tasks)
The thing is there aren't many aptitudes required to flip a burger (or any low-skilled job, which now dominate our economy). The thing employers base their decisions on is therefore things like "how much of a team player you are" (i.e. how much they can dick you over with low pay and still have you show up when they schedule you with 30 minutes notice). So you can construct all the tests you want, but a lot of jobs aren't selected on aptitude anyway.
Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Apr 19, 2014
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Apr 19, 2014 22:46
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