Don’t see the assess­ment prod­uct or edu­ca­tion mate­ri­als you need?  Spe­cific research can be geared toward answer­ing ini­tial ques­tions as well as gain­ing a wealth of infor­ma­tion on the skill char­ac­ter­is­tics of suc­cess­ful ver­sus unsuc­cess­ful expe­ri­ences with new employ­ees, stu­dents, mil­i­tary recruits, any­one. With some thought­ful intro­duc­tion and sup­port at the begin­ning lead­ing into train­ing, there could be demon­stra­ble gains in reten­tion and other suc­cess measures.

From our per­spec­tive, many orga­ni­za­tions expe­ri­ence issues very sim­i­lar to ACCESS and SUCCESS goals of com­mu­nity col­leges.  It seems like the obvi­ous, how­ever, remains elu­sive.  What most schools and orga­ni­za­tions attempt to do is test and then require cer­tain courses already in place based on the person’s scores.  What is most needed in many cases is a way to strengthen the foun­da­tion at the very begin­ning with a person-centered process that includes pos­i­tive assess­ment and the devel­op­ment of goals tied to the assess­ment and to the individual’s goals.

A pro­duc­tive activ­ity in new appli­ca­tions of our pos­i­tive assess­ment processes is the norm­ing of instru­ments for pop­u­la­tions within spe­cific orga­ni­za­tions and cul­tures.  While research has shown our instru­ments to be quite sta­ble across cul­tures (see Dukrat, 2009 for a com­par­i­son of first-year stu­dents from South Texas and South Africa), find­ing the norms in new appli­ca­tions pro­vides an ini­tial base­line for future work and orga­ni­za­tional improvement.

The cost of research and related pub­lish­ing varies depend­ing on the goals for the research, research design, and needed report­ing. For more infor­ma­tion, please con­tact us.