Week 7: Organizational Socialization
Vocational Aptitude Exams
Prompt:
Here’s a free career aptitude test for you to try. This episode of The Simpsons in which Bart and Lisa take an aptitude test is useful for starting discussions about anticipatory socialization. What effects might tests like these have on people are various stages of life? How did you react to your own results?
I’ve taken a good number of these in my lifetime, largely in late middle and throughout high school. The intense variety of responses I’ve received has never encouraged much faith in their validity and trustworthiness — I’ve always seen them as more of a brainstorming tool. “If I wanted to be a person who had traits like this, habits like this, and/or responds to a situation like this, what jobs does this test’s bias and context suggest?” I’ve received everything from nurse to schoolteacher to engineer to occupations in the sciences, and one even had a strange and vague suggestion along the line of “human interactions management”. So when the aptitude test suggested by our prompt gave a heap of engineering and Biological sciences options, I was neither surprised nor phased. After all, with their method of using the sliders, this test is absolutely one with more controllable outcomes. A participant very directly builds the kind of career they want — there’s no metaphor, fancy statistics, or covert and indirect questioning to take that level of control away from the participant. With such direct questions, it’s almost as if participants are less building their future career and more building the kind of environment (or organizational culture) they want to work in.
Aptitude tests with more controllable and predictable outcomes are, I think, the way to go. Without such integrity, aptitude test results can feel almost magical, and to some, I think this can cause an unfortunate level of (potentially subconscious) trust in their suggested areas for success. Especially when participants are young, say, middle-school or lower, the tendency to believe the results on some level increases. Largely, though, I think it’s understood these test outcomes are simply suggestions — at best coerced by well-meaning and fancy statistics, and at worst the result of websites wanting more add views, but still simply suggestions.
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Motivating a Positive Learning Environment
Prompt:
How can instructors motivate a positive learning environment? How can students and instructors construct a class culture that encourages engaged and effective learning?
The book employs a relatively small reference frame for their definition of culture — in this chapter, it’s the traits of the environment in which someone works. This includes everything from that group’s values, rituals, stories, metaphors, and so on. I have found that some of the courses in which I’ve not only learned a lot but really wanted to learn more had fairly strong elements in most of these categories.
One of my most difficult yet enjoyable classes had enormous tradition behind it. The professor was academically old-fashioned; students were to read outside class, listen in class, and understand on their own time — office hours were for questions and concerns, though if a student felt their confusion would be shared by classmates, they were encouraged to interrupt. This almost ritual-like set of rules was made very clear on day one in the course, but it was seldom unexpected, as the class was whispered about amongst students from the eldest down. The professor made clear his values from the start: mathematically correct answers were not the goal, though they are certainly nice — but instead, the goal was to grow in understanding the techniques of the study. As long as a student showed a work ethic and improvement, they would be alright, even if their exams were fairly low-scoring. This fostered a real sense of camaraderie, as collaborative completion of homeworks was encouraged (though copying a peer’s work was not), and it seemed students worked to help one another improve to get that grade rather than competing against each other to get a higher score. The class had a difficult academic load, and the material was very challenging, but because of the intense culture built around it, it felt as though students were completing a rite-of-passage, and since they were not going through such a process on their own, students were motivated to work through the often-intensely-difficult material. Using such elements as values, stories, rituals, and even some heroes and heroines (as various physicists’ contributions were admiringly covered), a strong culture was built around the course, and I felt this helped students engage and effectively learn. From this experience, I think such elements could be fostered in most courses, and students might positively benefit.
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