Evaluation of Alternative Aptitude Area (AA) Composites and Job Families for Army Classification

This is a HUMAN RESOURCES RESEARCH ORGANIZATION ALEXANDRIA VA report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A140034. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: Effective January 2002, the Army adopted a set of nine AA composites based on empirically estimated weights for a 7-subtest ASVAB battery. With support from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), Zeidner, Johnson, and colleagues developed these composites as part of a proposed two-tiered classification system. This change was motivated by a program of research funded by ARI and conducted by Zeidner, Johnson, and others demonstrating that the proposed system could significantly improve the overall classification and assignment of Army personnel to entry-level jobs. The current study aimed to independently evaluate the efficacy of the proposed AA composites, and corresponding job families, to meet the Army's classification objectives. More specifically, the present study tested the stability and differential validity of the proposed AA composites and accompanying job families, particularly the 17 and 150 relative to the 9 AAs, and their practical effects on classification efficiency as measured by mean predicted performance (MPP). For both scientific and practical reasons, the findings suggest the continued operational use of the 9 (standardized) AA composites and do not support the use of a larger number of composites/job families. These findings have been briefed to the Enlisted Accessions Division, G-1 and, in effect, represent a pull-back of recommendations based on earlier research for increasing the number of composites/job families.