Lesson 2

Situational Assessments - slide 6

Conduct the Assessment
What do I want to learn from the assessment?

At this point, you should have identified the specific environment where the individual is going to participate in the assessment as well as spent a little bit of time there to develop a schedule and task analysis for the job duties the individual is going to perform. The other thing that I think is important to think about before you actually go to the workplace is to determine what exactly it is you want to learn when you are there with the individual. What skills, abilities, interests, support needs are you going to pay attention to or want to learn something about while you are performing the assessment, so in other words not just going to the workplace and saying well I’m going observe the person and what he or she does.

Now does that mean that you need to have a very formal assessment form? No, I don’t think so, I think what it does mean is that you probably should jot down a checklist or idea about what you are going to observe. Now, there are certainly formal assessments, or consumer assessment forms that you can have a look at. A couple of those you will find in the supported employment handbook that you were sent for this course. One of them is a situational assessment form as well, and on that particular form it allows you to compare the individuals performance across several different assessments.

Now, why would you want to compare the individual’s performance across several different assessments? Lets think about an example. Lets say that you happen to go to three different worksites and you notice at one that the individual tends to be extremely withdrawn, does not interact with the other coworkers or with you vs. another workplace where the individual engages in the job duty tasks or work at hand. Now it may be related to the actual work task that might be one thing you want to consider. Or it could be related to the characteristics of the workplace itself. It may be that the individual performed better at a place that had more structure, or where the coworkers were supportive. So not only are we looking at the actual job duty or task that the individual is performing, but we are also trying to have a look at the characteristics of the workplace.

We might want to know what responses the individual makes to a busy, noisy environment. An environment where all of a sudden the workload gets very hectic and intense, can the individual adjust to the level of intensity, whether it is slight or high in intensity. Whether the individual works well in an environment where there are lots of people vs. not so many people. All of those characteristics about the environment could be determined by looking across different workplaces that you go to with the individual.

Now if you notice some of those things or notice some of those issues, you may actually want to, for instance, if the individual does very well in one workplace vs. very poorly in another but the job tasks were very dissimilar, then you may need another assessment to determine whether it was the environment or the actual job tasks that were creating problems for the individual. Some other things that I like to think about within the context of conducting the assessment is really looking at the optimal time of performance for the individual, the response to the coworkers, whether they respond well to supervision, do they respond better to environments where there are people the same age as the individual, younger, older? What’s a good mix and match between that individual and the coworkers? Would they respond better to an environment where they get some of that intermittent supervision and reinforcement vs. a workplace where there is very little of that support.

So those are all kinds of things that we would want to consider and learn about the individual when we are conducting the situational assessments. Now the forms that you might look at and see in your handbook also are going to speak to things such as the person’s endurance, strength ability to stand vs. sit. So all of he physical characteristics of the job tasks as well. Now I do need to say one more thing before we actually move onto another slide.

If we were to find that the individual did not have adequate strength for this particular position then does that mean that we are going to rule out every job that requires the same types of tasks? Well it may mean that the individual could work doing the same job in a less demanding environment. Where the pace is slower. Where the production standard is slower or not as great. And so what we are really trying to look at, I think, to get a headset for, is that we are trying to look at what are the demands for the environment the individual can meet at his/her care abilities? What compensatory strategies can we put in place to allow the person to be successful? So that we are not just going to say ok we exclude this type of job duty, because he/she has gotten negative comments all the way down here, but rather thinking of it in terms of how can we match this person to a position in the community?