The Effects of Response Instructions on Situational Judgment TestPerformance and Validity in a High-Stakes Context

摘要

This study fills a key gap in research on response instructions in situational judgment tests (SJTs). Theauthors examined whether the assumptions behind the differential effects of knowledge and behavioraltendency SJT response instructions hold in a large-scale high-stakes selection context (i.e., admission tomedical college). Candidates (N = 2,184) were randomly assigned to a knowledge or behavioraltendency response instruction SJT, while SJT content was kept constant. Contrary to prior research inlow-stakes settings, no meaningfully important differences were found between mean scores for theresponse instruction sets. Consistent with prior research, the SJT with knowledge instructions correlatedmore highly with cognitive ability than did the SJT with behavioral tendency instructions. Finally, nodifference was found between the criterion-related validity of the SJTs under the two response instructionsets.