The Possible Relationships Between Human Behavior, Human Performance, and their contexts

Authors: Edmund W. Gordon, Emily Campbell, and Paola Heincke

Consulting Editor: Michael Cole, Ana Marie Cauce, and John Lawrence Aber

The various contexts for human performance may be categorized as economic, physical, political (polity), psychological and social. Consensus as well as idiosyncratic perceptions of such contexts are thought to influence all human performance. The assessment measurement of human performance is thought to be context dependent. As epistemologies concerning and technologies for identifying contexts become more sensitive to the presence of and variations in contexts and their meanings, the relationships between contexts and human performance will become more critical for measurement science and assessment technologies. Thus it is that the Gordon Commission is developing a review and synthesis paper concerning possible relationships between such features of contexts as attribution, cultural identity, environment, perspective and situation on one hand, and the measurement of human performance on the other. The Commission is interested in more than the measurement of contexts and environments. Rather, we want to privilege the fact of interaction between the components of contexts, as well as the interactions between performers and the contexts in which they are called upon to perform. We want attention given to indicators of conditional adaptability as functions of specifiable contexts and the perspectives born of the cultural identities of the respondents. We proceed from the assumption that human behavior and performance are more than linear. They are causal and organic phenomena. As such, they must be thought of, observed, assessed and understood as dynamic, epigenetic, living in specific contexts and from specific perspectives.