Analysis of Three Interest Inventories

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Introduction

As an educator and advisor, I am very interested in student interest inventories. Working in the classroom, it can be very difficult to assess interest of students when choosing thematic units or classroom project. As a college advisor, I am constantly searching for resources to help my students choose a future career path. I completed research and found three popular interest inventories- the Strong Interest Inventory, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Clifton Strengths Finder. Each of the three assessments analyze the same general theme of interest, personality and career choice. I have analyzed each to determine the best interest inventory to use with my students.

Test A: 1994 Strong Interest Inventory

The Strong Interest Inventory was developed in 1935 by researcher E. K. Strong. The inventory is highly related to Holland’s Codes, a six-part occupational choice theory. The six components are Realistic, Creative, Investigative, Social, Enterprising and Artistic. More than 55,000 individuals completed the research version of the 1994 Strong Interest Inventory that was used in the study Validity, Structure and Content of the 19994 Strong Interest Inventory (Donnay & Borgen 1996). The inventory consists of 317 items, and is mostly used with a wide age range of high school age to older adults.

The inventory is based on general occupational themes, basic interest scales and personal style scales. These scales have a mean of 50 and standard deviation of 10 (Donnay & Borgen 1996). Personal style scales are bipolar scales, meaning they have distinct and meaningful poles. The study then goes on to discuss each of the three types of questions and identifies the answers and correlation for each.

Of the three sec...

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... get funding from my department to pay for the testing. Free versions of the test are also available at some resources online. Therefore, the administrative concerns for the MBTI are the least of the three test options.

Works Cited

Donnay, D., & Borgen, F. (1996). Validity, Structure and Content of the 1994 Strong Interest

Inventory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43(5), 275-291.

http://doi.apa.org/journals/cou/43/3/275.pdf

Lopez, S., Hodges, T., & Harter, J. (2005, January 8). The Clifton StrengthsFinder Technical

Report: Development and Validation. Clifton Strengths Finder. Retrieved April 26, 2011,

from http://strengths.org/docs/CSFTechnicalReport.pdf

Pittenger, D. (2003). The Utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Review of

Educational Research, 63(4), 467-488. Retrieved April 27, 2011, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1170497

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