Refining Situational Judgment Test Methods

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) assess knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. They present scenarios, which are based on real events, to be judged, understood, scaled, and interpreted by the examinee. These instruments have been used to evaluate cognitive theories and training programs, and to predict performance. This paper presents the argument that SJTs have potential to renew and reinvigorate many aspects of psychological measurement. We provide a framework to categorize the broad range of procedures and formats adopted for SJTs. The framework indicates that the psychometric range and power of SJTs might be extended by incorporating: (a) Theories and models of human cognition and performance to systematically specify the detail provided in the scenarios; (b) Likert and constructed response formats to maximize breadth of information collected for each scenario; and (c) Consensus-based scoring methods to evaluate knowledge and attitude domains associated with emerging applications.