6. An example of the application of the framework: The ALL practical-cognition study

In their everyday lives, people continually need to make situational judgments: how to get along with a difficult boss, how to break bad news to a friend or coworker, how to handle anger or disappointment after a failed endeavor. These skills are important to life adjustment in general, and to workplace efficacy, in particular. This report describes a project aimed at measuring such skills.

The project described here had three major goals. The first goal was to develop a theory-based instrument to measure practical cognition as measured by everyday situational-judgment skills. The second goal was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the instrument, including item characteristics, reliability, and both internal and external validity. The third goal was to compare the psychometric properties and the utility of the instrument in two cultural settings: the United States and Spain.

We also decided that there were certain goals that we explicitly were not setting for this project. The first was to measure all possible kinds of situational-judgment skills. In this first phase of our project, we concentrated on workplace situational-judgment skills. In later phases, we will seek to measure other kinds of situational-judgment skillsas well. The second thing we did not try to do was to measure everyday situational-judgment skills in an occupation-specific way. Previously, as described earlier, we had devised a number of inventories for specific occupations, such as managers, salespeople, university professors, university students, military officers, and elementary-school teachers (see Sternberg, Wagner, and Okagaki, 1993; Sternberg, Forsythe, et al., in press; Sternberg, Wagner, Williams, and Horvath, 1995; Wagner and Sternberg, 1986). We intended in this project to extend our methodology to jobs in general rather than devising yet another measure for another specific occupation. Third, we did not seek an inventory with "objectively correct" answers, because situational judgments are, by their nature, more or less useful or possibly justifiable, but they are not, strictly speaking, objectively correct or incorrect. The theoretical basis for our work is the triarchic theory of cognitive skills (Sternberg, 1985a, 1988, 1997, in press-b).

In the current work, we have sought to extend our past work in three ways. First, we have measured informal knowledge that is relatively more domain general than in our past work, where we have targeted specific jobs or career paths. Second, we have sought to extend our findings cross-culturally, using the same inventory in translated form in Spain as in the U.S. Third, we have used item-response-theory (IRT) scaling in order to explore the scalar properties of our inventory.

We also have used a new conceptual framework in this research, which is shown in Figure 1. This framework, used for item construction, crosses three objects of attention (dealing with self, dealing with others, dealing with tasks) with five categories of behavior (motivating, interpreting situations, behaving, following directions, and organizing).