Assessment

Goals

  1. Describe assessment.

  2. Effectively use assessment to improve the quality of anything you want.

  3. Guide others so that they effectively improve quality of things that matter.

Assessment (What)

Let X represent something whose quality can be improved.

To assess X means to carefully identify its strengths and ways to make it better, typically in ways that lead to improvements in quality; also know as growth.

Examples

Assessment is used for the improving the quality of X.

X can be

  1. Performances: Leading. Playing pool. Writing. Parenting. Engineering. Running a meeting. Playing the flute. Stand up comedy.

  2. Products (Good and Services): Cars, Hair Cut, Websites, Government services.

  3. Processes: A chocolate cake recipe, a method for writing code, how one goes about shopping, trip planning, construction, manufacturing, customer relations.

Analysis (Breakdown of Main Ideas)

Improvement Improvements in Learning Improvements

Improvement, which I also call growth, refers to increasing the quality or something or increasing other rewards or decreasing drawbacks. better results, fewer drawbacks or more rewards. Examples: playing tennis better, improving your ability to code, becoming better at chemistry, improving a method, improving a product, improving a culture, reducing the cost to manufacture something, coming up with a better technique, and so on.

Quality

Quality refers to the level of excellence of something on a scale that span from zero to high quality.

More Examples

  1. Examine your own writing or someone else’s writing and find

    • Three things you are doing well and should continue doing
    • One way to improve your future writing

  2. Examine a shed you just built and figure out

    • Three actions you took that promote high-quality construction
    • One future action that will save you time in building

  3. A team examines their performance and determines

    • Four actions that are enhancing collaboration
    • Two future actions that will fix concerns.

Rationale

Summary: Continually get better result while reducing drawbacks (cost, time, effort, hassles, ..) and increasing enjoyment. This trifecta is highly worthwhile.

Here are some reasons why skilled assessment is worthwhile.

  1. Produces improvement (growth) in products, performances, methods, and so on.
    1. Growth provides a payoff to actors (groups and individuals).
    2. Growth causes satisfaction, optimism, passion, and persistence.
  2. Enhances collaboration.
    1. Major impacts in collaboration, not small ones.
    2. Better collaboration leads to better results plus people feeling better.
    3. Enhances trust, respect, listening, and many other skills that are essential for collaboration.
  3. Causes learning.
    1. This provides payoffs on the current task plus all future tasks.

Here are some concerns.

  1. Hard to learn.

    1. Not many examples out there.
    2. Many people have not experienced high-quality assessment.

  2. Hard to find people who can provide helpful assessment. But, there are some fixes:

    1. AI Assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot) can provide useful assessment.
    2. If you are skilled in self-assessment, then you can get useful assessment from those who are not skilled by applying your facilitation skills.
      1. How To: Ask questions about strengths, improvements, and insights

  3. I’d like to cite research to back up the conclusions I’ve reached. However, I am unaware of any such research.

  4. Assessment needs to be followed up on to get its improvements (payoffs). After the assessment is done,

    • Strengths need to be retained.
    • Improvements need to be acted on.

Skilled Assessment (How To)

The Framework

Here is the framework.

Tips