Performance-Based Assessment: a Methodology
Chapter 1: Executive Summary
The full document was originally published by the National Institute for Dispute Resolution, and is now available without charge as an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file.This document brings to conclusion a consensus-based effort to provide mediation programs, courts and other interested parties with improved tools for selecting, training and evaluating mediators. In so varied a field, the term consensus-based must be given specific meaning: Experience has demonstrated that agreement on every point of this difficult subject matter is not to be had, and the term is used here in its more limited sense of a process which has the goals of consensus and uses, broadly, the methods of consensus-building.
This Methodology attempts to provide as rounded a discussion as is possible at this time, and tries to resolve several different approaches to mediation; but it also demonstrates the whys and wherefores of a complex discussion in which a number of statements should not be attributed to all members of the team.
The Methodology begins with a brief introduction explaining the origins of the effort, and continues with "Conceptions of Mediation," an explication of some of the varying views of what mediation is or should be. The two following sections turn to an analysis of objections that were raised to the direction of the document's predecessor Interim Guidelines for Selecting Mediators, and describe multiple ways that performance-based assessment can be used in this still-adolescent field.
This is followed by "How a Mediator Works," a discussion of the original field study that led to this effort, intended to ground the remainder of the discussion in the observed behavior of some mediators at work. Lists of common tasks and skills of mediators are then discussed; and the concluding section of the text proper, "Performance Evaluation Criteria," gives examples of the kind of evaluation scales which result from this type of analysis, together with a discussion of the process of analysis and redrafting which are required by the varying intentions and circumstances of different programs. In subsequent editions of this Methodology, appropriate additional scales will be included as they emerge in the field.
The references are followed by two appendices, which contain complex subject matter likely to be of interest primarily to program managers and others engaged in efforts to construct specific tools for specific usages. "Using Tests in Selection" is self-explanatory, and contains analyses of various aspects of performance-based selection based on the experiences of the original programs using such tools. "Two Sample Cases" is intended as a methodological aid to drafters of exercises, and goes into detail as to two (now retired) specific examinations, accompanying their verbatim text with a running warts-and-all commentary on how these designs worked out in practice.