Question
What are the strengths and limitations of Performance-Based Assessments?
Answer
Strengths and Limitations of Performance-Based Assessments
One of the strengths is that we believe it has a high level of ecological validity. That is the whole point of us doing it. The limitations are it only provides insight into that activity. As I mentioned, the activities have to be novel, but not new. It has to be important to the client. It cannot be completely new and out of the blue. You can obviously get some information from the activity that could be relevant somewhere else. If someone is doing the Complex Task Performance Assessment, you might get some information about how they might manage their bills, but that is not really what it was designed to look at. You cannot retest with the alternate forms. That is key and something that is abused out in practice and research.
Once someone does these performance-based assessments, they know how to do them, and unless they have some type of profound memory deficit, they are going to remember. The next time they do it, it will be easier. It is like you and me learning a new activity. Once you have done it once, they are getting better the second time. We actually showed this in the CTPA. We put that in the paper saying the people improved 40% within a week without us doing anything in between. You cannot say that the person is getting better, because of your intervention when you just re-administered the assessment. The problem is that we do not have alternate forms for a lot of these and that is something we need to work on.
