RELEVANT
WORKPLACE,
COMMUNITY AND
SCHOOL TRAINING
AND EQUIPMENT
What is workplace?
A workplace in assessment involves observing a candidate as they perform
their daily tasks, often over a period of time, and using a variety of methods
to gain an all-round picture of that person’s current abilities and future
potential.
Why is it necessary?
Not everyone learns in the same way, and someone who is naturally good at
something may not be able to demonstrate that ability in a classroom
environment. Some people have book smarts and others have street smarts,
and if the letter is not to be overlooked when assessing the overall
competency of a workforce, then workplace assessment needs to play a vital
role.
Common Workplace Assessment
For ease, we’ll characterize them as either competence or behavioral assessments. You
might think about this as assessing either for skill and knowledge (competence) or
personality traits and soft skills (behavioral)
Common competence assessments may be offered individually or for larger group of
candidates or employees. These assessments typically test:
Job knowledge- an accountant might be quizzed on accounting principles
Cognitive ability- to gauge logical, verbal, and numerical reasoning
Skill assessment- measuring skill level in say typing speed, computer literacy,
writing, data checking
Physical ability- for professions that require strength and stamina
Relevant Community
Assessing your community’s strength and weakness is an important first step in
planning an effective service project. By taking the time to learn about your
community’s issues, your club can discover new opportunities for service projects
and prevent the duplication of existing community assets.
Communities in Action provides detailed guidelines for conducting effective
community assessments. The following tools can be used in conjunction with an
assessment to ensure that your project will meet community needs and make the
best use of available resources. Clubs can adapt these inexpensive assessment
options to fit their communities:
Community Assessment Tools
1. Survey
A survey is one of the best known and most popular methods of
assessing a community’s strengths and weaknesses. Surveys can be simple
targeting only small group of community stakeholders, or complex,
sampling large segments of a population. An effective community survey
can reveal a wealth of useful and easily quantifiable information and is a
good option for many projects.
2. Asset Inventory
An asset inventory is technique for collecting information about a
community through observations. It’s similar to a shopkeeper taking stock of
merchandise, but instead of cataloguing products in a store, community
members catalogue assets in their community. It works best when conducted
at a community meeting gathering.
To conduct the inventory, small teams of participants walk around their
community identifying people, places, and things they think are valuable.
Team members then discuss their choices create a list for the team, and share
it with the larger group.
3. Community Mapping
Community mapping is used to reveal people’s different perspective
about a community. It requires few resources and little time and can be
adapted to participants of virtually any age or education background.
In this facilitated activity, individuals or groups of participants draw a
map of their community, marking certain points of importance and noting
how often they visit these places. A facilitator leads a discussions about the
maps, while another facilitator records the discussion. Community mapping
can be conducted at both informal community gathering and at meetings to
which community stakeholders are invited.
4. Daily Activities Schedule
Finding out about the work habits of community members
is an excellent way to learn about a community’s division of
labor and perceptions of work, based on gender and age. It
can also help identify areas where new vocational techniques
or tools might be used to improve a community’s work
efficiency.
In this facilitated activity, participants are separated into
groups of men and women and asked to develop an average
daily schedule, based on their daily activities. A facilitator
leads participants in a discussion of the different activities of
community members, while another facilitator records the
main points of the discussion.
This type of assessment reveals a great deal about perceptions
of gender that might limit the effectiveness of a service project by affecting the participation of some community
stakeholders. It can also provide important information about
when different groups of people are available to participate in certain types of activities.
5. Sessional Calendar
This activity reveals changes in seasonal labor supply and
demand, household income patterns, food availability, and
demands on public resources, such as schools, mass transit
systems, and recreational facilities.
In this facilitated activity, a group of community members is
divided into smaller groups based on age, gender, or profession. A facilitator asks each group to identify
different tasks
members must do at different times of the year (related to
paid and unpaid work, social events, educational activities,
family health, and environmental changes) and plot them on
a timeline, which they then share with the other groups. The
facilitator leads a discussion in which participants examine
the differences.
These results can be used to determine the best times of the
year to begin certain projects and to consider how projects
will affect different groups of people.
6. Community Café
A community cafe creates the atmosphere of a restaurant or
cafe in which small groups of people from the community
discuss issues raised by facilitators. It can be both an entertaining event for
Rotarians and a unique way to learn about
a community by engaging stakeholders in a direct dialogue.
Each table has a “host,” or facilitator, who guides discussions on
a particular topic. Participants move from table to table after a
certain amount of time. As each issue is discussed, major ideas
are recorded by the hosts, who report the most common ideas
from their discussions to the cafe “maitre d’,” or head facilitator.
Clubs can use these ideas to determine what projects to undertake in their
communities.
7. Focus Group
A focus group is a carefully planned discussion used to determine a community’s preferences
and opinions on a particular
issue or idea. Conducting a focus group requires careful
planning and someone skilled at facilitating discussions.
Most focus groups consist of 5 to 10 diverse stakeholders.
Participants are asked a series of carefully worded questions
that focus on different issues in the community.
An effective focus group will seem more like a job interview
than a lively debate or group discussion. Though some clubs
include a focus group at a club meeting, it can be more effective to conduct a focus group in a
private setting, with
one or two facilitators and someone to record participant
responses
8. Panel Discussion
A panel discussion is a guided exchange involving several
experts on a specific subject. Panel discussions are carefully structured and typically involve a facilitator
who asks panelists specific questions about the community or a particular
issue. Often, city governments, nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, and universities
pay experts to
collect and interpret detailed information about communities and the issues they face. Drawing on this
expertise is an
excellent way to learn about a community without having to invest a lot of time or money in a new
community
assessment.
Before conducting a panel discussion, identify community members who are qualified to talk about
particular issues and resources. Panels generally have four to six experts on a particular issue (for example,
a discussion on community health might include a doctor from a local hospital, a health official from a
government health office, a professor from a local university who researches community health issues, and
a community health care specialist from a local nonprofit or nongovernmental organization). To get a
broader view of the community, consider facilitating a series of panel discussions on different issues.
Panel discussions are a powerful tool to raise the awareness of club members and to quickly learn
about service opportunities from expert.
Relevant School Training Center and
Equipment
Classroom assessments have a greater impact on student learning than any type of
assessment conducted outside the classroom. Classroom assessment are particularly
important to improve student learning, especially when they comprise formative
feedback and help students to understand their own learning strategies. Classroom
assessment allow for evaluation of competencies that cannot be easily measured using
external standardized assessments. When they are conducted on an ongoing basis, they
provide a range of evidence which teachers can use to monitor student progress and to
adjust teaching in response to students’ learning needs. This means that in countries
with effective student assessment systems, greater emphasis is placed on what happens
in the classroom and the role of the teacher.
Although assessments are currently used for many purposes in the
educational system, a premise of this report is that their effectiveness and
utility must ultimately be judged by the extent to which they promote
student learning. The aim of assessment should be "to educate and improve
student performance, not merely to audit it“. To this end, people should gain
important and useful information from every assessment situation. In
education, as in other professions, good decision making depends on access
to relevant, accurate, and timely information. Furthermore, the information
gained should be put to good use by informing decisions about curriculum
and instruction and ultimately improving student learning
Educational assessment occurs in two major contexts. The first is the
classroom. Here assessment is used by teachers and students mainly to assist
learning, but also to gauge students' summative achievement over the longer
term. Second is large-scale assessment, used by policy makers and
educational leaders to evaluate programs and/or obtain information about
whether individual students have met learning goals.
The purpose of an assessment determines priorities, and the context of
use imposes constraints on the design, thereby affecting the kinds of
information a particular assessment can provide about student achievement.
