Assessdo Blog Posts

Assessing Subjective Evaluation of Risk

Post: 4/26/2022

By: RODNEY ZIMMERMAN

Everyday we witness the relationship between risk perception and positive psychology. Risk perception is a complex psychological aspect that encompasses an individual’s subjective evaluation of risks, incorporating cognitive, emotional, and situational factors. Understanding an individual’s risk perception can help in predicting their behaviors and decision-making processes in various contexts. This perception can vary significantly from person to person due to various psychological and environmental factors. Positive psychology surrounds positive emotions. This branch of psychology focuses on understanding and fostering positive experiences, emotions, strengths, and overall well-being. Risk perception and positive psychology play crucial roles in assessments for several reasons.

5 Reasons Why Assessdo Will Design A Tool That Focusses on Risk Perception & Positive Psychology

Decision-Making: Understanding how individuals perceive risks is critical for predicting their decisions. Assessments that consider risk perception can provide insights into how people might approach various situations, make choices, and manage uncertainties.
Behavioral Predictions: Risk perception influences behavior. Assessments that gauge risk perception help in predicting how individuals might behave in different scenarios. Similarly, assessments incorporating positive psychology aid in predicting behaviors influenced by positive experiences, emotions, and mindsets.
Well-being Outcomes: Risk perception affects health-related decisions and behaviors. Assessments that consider risk perception can offer insights into health-related choices, such as lifestyle decisions and willingness to take health risks.
Mental Health and Resilience: Positive psychology assessments provide valuable information about an individuals strengths, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Understanding these aspects can guide interventions and support for mental health and well-being.
Tailored Interventions: By recognizing individual differences in risk perception and positive psychology, tailored interventions and support systems can be designed. This approach allows for more effective and personalized strategies for mental health, well-being, and risk management.

Assessments that consider risk perception and positive psychology enable a more holistic understanding of individuals. They provide insights into their behaviors, decision-making processes, and overall well-being, offering valuable information for designing interventions, formulating policies, and improving individual outcomes in various aspects of life.

Perhaps this can be used in different industries for different purposes. Being an athlete, my original thought was athletics and the idea of assessing how student athletes perceive situations. Perhaps this would give me a better understanding of comfort levels at camp between levels of competition. The data could be used to show coaches a better way to evaluate practice and game situations based on the experiences and environments of each individual. Coaches could then provide interventions through practice time that prepares their student athletes for games.

There are so many directions such a tool could be used. There should be many considerations when designing this tool including simplicity. Nobody wants to sit and take a string of assessments. Perhaps one assessment could give more data if constructed around pictures and context. Not just a subjective assessment, but rather an assessment that allows the person taking it to consider many different possibilities to describe their thoughts.

Tool Used to Calculate Threat Levels Within Natural Language Conversations

Perhaps AI can one day design the appraisals. This thought leads me to the idea of what if. What if a machine could generate a conversation and build a behavior and personality of the interaction. What if that machine could not only learn the person, but predict their next move based on situation perception. Could this be something that the military could would benefit from. Could this assessment technology tool be used for training simulations,

Tool Used For Higher Level Exploration

Perhaps this tool could be used as a natural language tool to enhance the communication between home devices and human conversation. Is it so scary to think that your home system is getting to know you better; understand your mood patterns, and could soon change the temperature, lighting, mood music, etc in the house; all based on its interpretation of your conversations. Does this tool then become your friend where it travels with you on your phone, or links to your car? The thought of assessing in natural language in which the machine continues to create conversations with you based on its own design of appraisals can seem a bit scary. It’s not. In fact, let’s put the ethical and moral component into the conversation. The system does not judge you based on an initial program. Instead, the system builds a neural skeleton of your behavioral patterns and stops there. The system is programmed to understand that every second, a human could potentially have behavioral changes. This means that a neural skeleton is the best way to grow the structure of the humanoid.

If we as humans see a deeper reflection of the person we are becoming; perhaps we will learn to focus more on our possibilities instead of relying on social standards dictating who we are becoming.

Assessments Should Exercise Working Memory

Post: 6/19/2023

By: RODNEY ZIMMERMAN

Recognizing the length of a humans attention span is becoming much shorter, it was important to understand that a huge part of focus is motivation. I believe it is important to begin by understanding how the design of an assessment (appraisal) tool can be used each human being. My research begin by understanding working memory capacity. Does a person hyper-focus on an assessment based on context? And will a person be able to be authentic with their thoughts without hyper-focusing on what they think is being assessed?

Structure around an appraisal is key to improved assessing. Focus around the assessment is very important as the average human attention span is less than 9 seconds. This means that we interrupt ourselves from our own thoughts. Todays technology has made this easier as we have lost our way to focus. Research shows that a framework of values is what separates those that focus from those that do not focus. If this is true, this means that the assessment has to bring value to the process. Not only can the appraisal not lose focus of what it is trying to accomplish, but it also has to hold the attention within the process of working memory capacity.

iWhile the key to focus is to keep one thing running in our minds; what if that was not the answer towards an affective assessment. If a person enters into an assessment with a goal not associated with the interpretive outcome, can’t that skew the assessment? The persons goals may include 1) completing the assessment quickly to move on to something else without giving any real thought to the question; or 2) providing relevant answers that they know the interpreter wants to see in the results as to not create controversy. I want to create an assessment tool that allows for stronger working memory capacity. I want a person to take an assessment in which they have multiple stories for one situation perception; can be authentic with their thoughts and responses, and don’t have to worry about how the interpreter will view their every response. This process, I believe, can ultimately eliminate the bias within the processes of assessing.

There are different techniques in work models which I believe can run parallel to techniques in assessment processes. Such processes include:

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method based on 25-minute stretches of focused work broken by five-minute breaks. Longer breaks, typically 15 to 30 minutes, are taken after four consecutive work intervals.

Can this same technique be applied to assessments? I believe so. If a person being assessed has 1 question with contextual choices, instead of a range of likert scale or visual analog scale questions, this would in turn create a more consciously defined answer by the participant. The bigger question perhaps is to ask if the data received from the one assessment can in turn be more powerful than a series of subjective questions with no contextual analysis.

The Block Schedule System provides questions that identify what you need to work on for the day; figuring out when you’re most productive; scheduling your time blocks; blocking off personal time; allowing for unexpected interruptions or work; planning for lost time; and adjusting as needed.

Can this system be applied to assessments? Absolutely. All relative to time, what if the assessment was provided at the right time. In the Assessdo system, it will be important to think about when Assessments are given. Perhaps providing evaluators with an option to set times for assessments to be distributed is the key. As well, looking into the relevance of timers on assessments, it is important to consider pressure simulation, focus and concentration, real-time assessing, and efficiency and productivity.