Interpersonal and intrapersonal skill assessment alternatives: Self-reports, situational judgment tests, and discrete choice experiments
Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a 10-criteria evaluative framework from seminal and cutting-edge research to compare extant self-reports and situational judgment tests (SJTs) from each construct and to design two discrete choice experiments (DCEs). Our evaluation detailed opportunities, challenges, and tradeoffs presented by each approach’s design considerations, possibilities for bias, and validity-related issues. We found that researchers rely heavily upon self-report instruments to measure constructs, such as creative thinking and global citizenship. We found evidence that the self-report instruments evaluated were susceptible to some biases more than others. We found that SJTs and DCEs may mitigate some concerns of bias and validity present in self-report when measuring interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. We make recommendations for future development of these formats.
