Test Standards Flashcards
What are the required fitness levels for a job intended to ensure the employee can do?
Perform the specific duties of the job in a safe, efficient and reliable manner
What are the two types of fitness testing within the workplace?
- Applicant testing (pre-employment screening tests)
- Incumbent testing (for people already employed ..to see if they can still do the job)
It is important to ensure the tests and standard are valid to be:
- fair to the applicants
- fair to employees
- able to withstand legal challenge in some countries
There are 12 guidelines that have been developed to develop tests and standards
- Establishing a Project Management Team that consists of all stakeholders
(this can change over time)
What are the 3 phases for developing tests and standards to meet BFOR requirements ?
Phase 1- task analysis
Phase 2- quantification of physically demanding tasks
Phase 3-development and validation of tests and standards
BFOR
What do you do in Task Analysis?
- Understand the nature of the job
-ID the most physically demanding, commonly performed and essential tasks - ## use site visits, questionnaires, interviews, lit review
What defines an essential task?
- tasks that cannot be changed or modified without undue hardship to the employer or risk to the employee
eg- being able to life a bear into the back of a truck would not be an essential task because there are lifts in place to do that.
Employers have duty to?
accommodate!
What do we do for phase 2? (quantification of physically demanding tasks)
why do we do this part?
We measure the biomechanical, physical and physiological demands of the tasks (weight of equipment, distances lifted & carried, HR, GPS, VO2)
Rate of perceived exertion
to confirm that these tasks are physically demanding!
What are the steps taken in phase 3? (Develop a valid test battery)
- Develop a primary test battery
- Take steps to validate test battery: (Validation questionnaire, validation of physiological measures, establish reliability)
- Finalize Test Battery
- Establish Minimal Performance standards for test & assess potential adverse impact of minimal performance standards (ie age, gender, size ethnicity bias)
What is convergent validity? What does it look like in practice?
Using multiple sources of info and different methods to establish the validity of a test
eg, we use a combination of..
- task analysis (logical validity)
-video analysis
-physiological demands
-participant feedback (ie, what is the level of agreement that the test represents the job, and the level of importance of this task to the job)
-use of subject matter experts
Where do our fit for duty standards come from?
Normative referenced, where we test a representative sample of workers and the standard is based on 3SDev from the lowest score of someone who did the test and is already on the job you’re testing
Criterion referenced, where the standard is based on a criteria associated with an acceptable rate of work …for example: physiological responses to work at the desired intensity, or an expert judge determining that this is an appropriate rate of work.
Why are SME’s (subject matter experts) potentially useful in criterion standard composition?
They are able to ID acceptable work based on their:
- experience doing the job
- their understanding of how efficiently, safely and quickly the job needs to be done
How would you use SME’s to determine a criterion standard?
- gather normative data of a representative sample to profile the performance
- use average performance and SD to establish different paces
- record the performance at different paces
- ask SMEs to determine if paces are acceptable or unacceptable
- regression equation can be used to determine minimally acceptable pace
What is the bookmark method? Why does this allow for confidence in our standard?
The point when you go from acceptable to unacceptable
- get supervisors to bookmark, chat, rebookmark, etc.
Because there is a consensus among experts….
SEM( standard error of the mean) decreases over time = confidence/ consensus…no uncertainty!
