Giftedness programs are composed of categories where each category has attributes that apply to job or individual assessments. For example, there may be a Skills category. Skills will have several attributes that describe skills that a job may require or that an individual may posses. Some of these attributes could be Computers, Painting, Speaking, Teaching, and so on.
Categories and attributes can be weighted to affect the outcome of an assessment. While not necessary, weighting can be used to effectively rank one category attribute over another. Using the previous Skills example, in one job Painting may be more important while in another Computers might be more important.This scenario can be taken care of, by ranking—basically placing the skills in order of importance for a particular job.
But what if two skills are both important? Weighting the attributes and even further, weighting the categories can allow you to acknowledge not just which category or attribute is more important, but how much more important one is over the rest (in percentage).
Weighting is an important part of assessing giftedness because it is good to understand what is most important from the individual's perspective and from the job perspective. Weighting different parts of the program provides control over which categories and attributes within categories are most important. The science behind giftedness assessment is the weighting.
Note: If the giftedness program does not include weighting documentation, you can either omit weighting altogether or experiment with the values. The ultimate goal is to match people with jobs they love so they will continue to volunteer!
Weighting applies to both categories and the attributes within the category. Weighting categories is fairly straightforward. Assign a percentage weight to each category based on the other categories. Together the weighting for all categories in the program should add up to 100%.
For example, if one Giftedness program has the following categories, these categories can be weighted as follows:
TOTAL: 100%
Weighting is a bit different when talking about category attributes. During job and individual assessments, attributes are selected in rank order. In other words, choose attributes within a category from most important to least important. Weighting for attributes determines how much more important the attribute in Rank 1 is from the attribute in Rank 2, the attribute in Rank 2 from the attribute in Rank 3 and so on.