A major goal of the Army Selection and Classification Project was to develop an experimental predictor battery that would best supplement the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery for making selection and classification decisions for entry‐level enlisted personnel. That is, what predictor measures would best serve the needs of all the jobs in an entire selection/classification system? This paper describes the characteristics of the new test battery and the procedures that were used to develop it. The major steps in the procedure were a structured literature search using a standard protocol, an extensive expert judgment study of expected true validities for a population of predictor variables against a population of performance components, fabrication of modularized software and a special response pedestal for computerized measurement of perceptual and psychomotor abilities, evaluations of experimental measures in three iterative pilot tests and one major field test, and a series of reviews by a panel of scientific advisers. The test battery that resulted from this 2 1/2‐year development effort is described. The basic psychometric properties of each measure, as determined in a large concurrent validation sample, are also described.
The standard deviation of performance quality measured in dollars, SD$, is critical to calculating the utility of personnel decisions. A popular technique for obtaining SD$ calls for supervisor estimates of the dollar value of performance at different levels. In many cases supervisors can base their estimates on the cost of contracting out the various levels of performance. Estimation problems can arise, however, in contexts where contracting out is not possible, such as in government organizations without private industry counterparts. Estimation problems may also exist where individual salary is only a small percentage of the value of the performance to the organization or of the equipment operated. This paper presents two strategies for estimating the value of performance and for determining SD$ by considering the changes in the numbers and performance levels of system units which lead to increased aggregate performance. One hundred U.S. Army tank commanders provided data about their jobs for these two strategies as well as for the supervisor estimation and salary percentage strategies. The new strategies appear to provide more appropriate and acceptable values of SD$ for those complex, expensive systems where dollar values of performance are less easily estimated.
The purpose of this paper was to examine the factor structure of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), Forms 8, 9, and 10. This standardized multiple cognitive abilities battery is the primary selection and classification instrument used by all military services. It consists of eight power and two speed tests. In this investigation the ASVAB 8/9/10 factor structure was compared with that observed for previous samples and for previous forms of the ASVAB. The similarity of factor structure for racial/ethnic and sex subgroups was examined for the purpose of establishing the possible invariance of ASVAB factorial validity across groups. A factor analysis of a sample of 98,689 male and female Army applicants yielded four orthogonal factors accounting for 93% of the total variance: Verbal Ability, Speeded Performance, Quantitative Ability, and Technical Knowledge. Factor analyses of male, female, white, black, and Hispanic subgroups yielded similar results. These analyses provided evidence of the replicability of ability constructs across diverse samples.
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