Incremental Validity of Leaderless Group Discussion Ratings Over and Above General Mental Ability and Personality in Predicting Promotion

Leaderless group discussions (LGDs) constitute one of the oldest assessment center exercises. In recent times, their added value has sometimes been questioned in light of trends to streamline assessment centers. The purpose of the present study is to examine the incremental validity of LGD ratings over cognitive ability scores and personality ratings for the prediction of extrinsic career success (i.e., promotion speed and number of promotions). We investigated this issue in the context of the promotion of French naval officers (N = 93) in an academy for high‐level executive positions over a 10‐year period. Results indicated that LGD ratings accounted for incremental variance in the prediction of promotion criterion measures, beyond cognitive ability and personality test scores. These results confirm that LGD ratings provide a unique contribution to the prediction of extrinsic career success in high‐level executive positions.     

Pilot programs in newborn screening

The term "pilot study" has been used over the years to describe the evaluation of the many elements involved in deciding whether a proposed condition should be added to a newborn screening (NBS) panel, and until recently, was unilaterally used to describe the evaluation of the assay to be used before the condition was officially adopted by a state for its newborn screening panel. Since Guthrie's introduction of screening for PKU, each time a new condition was added to the panel, the screening assay itself was validated through a population-based trial, in which the test was performed with de-identified samples to avoid association between the test result and the infant. This is considered by the laboratory as the "pilot phase" of adding a new condition. To advance the science of NBS, especially to accommodate new technologies that may provide new types of information (genetic versus physiological) for each new condition, pilot programs are essential. Involvement of the clinical community serves to improve these evaluations and provides the needed clinical validation of decisions made as a result of it. This paper describes the historical context of pilot programs in population-based NBS that utilize laboratory-based markers as indicators of concern; specifically, three applications that demonstrate different approaches to the use of pilots in adding conditions to a NBS panel are described.