driving abilities

The abilities

The difference between the highlands ability battery and other assessments is the difference between having an X-ray or a cat scan.

The Driving Abilities

The Highlands Ability Battery identifies five abilities as driving abilities. The scores in these abilities are significant in anticipating academic and occupational performance and satisfaction.

The five driving abilities are measured in separate work samples:

Classification assesses the ability to see relationships among seemingly unrelated events, situations, or information. The relative ability to move from the specific to the more general, to detect a common thread that joins individual objects into a pattern.

Concept Organization assesses the ability to arrange ideas, information, or objects in their most logical order. The ability to move from the general to the specific in solving problems.

Idea Productivity measures the number of ideas that spring to a person's mind over a particular period of time in response to a set of new facts. It measures the quantity of ideas, not the quality. This ability may be evidenced by the relative contributions of individuals who participate in a brainstorming session.

Spatial Relations Theory measures the relative ability to see and understand how things work. The ability to conceptualise and understand relationships, whether between abstractions or between tangible objects.

Spatial Relations Visualization measures the ability to " see" and follow in three dimensions an object that is represented in two dimensions. The ability is related to the relative preference for hands-on work and experience and the satisfaction in achieving tangible results.

The Specialized Abilities

The specialized abilities can be divided into two categories - musical abilities and other specialized abilities. Together and separately, these abilities have an impact on the ways in which an individual takes in and learns new material.

The musical abilities

Tonal Memory the ability to remember tunes, tonal sequences and linguistic content. An excellent measure of an individual's capacity to learn aurally, e.g. by listening to audio recordings.

Rhythm Memory the ease with which an individual can turn physical movement into a learning process.

Pitch Discrimination measures sensitivity to small differences in external stimuli; helpful to an individual in detecting subtle changes in the speech inflection of others.

Design Memory the ability to learn through graphics and to place new data and information into graphic form, e.g., diagrams, drawings, outlines, etc.

Observation the ability to focus on and remember visual details and to detect changes and irregularities as they occur.

Verbal Memory the ease with which an individual learns new words and remembers the content of information presented visually, as in printed text; sometimes called associative memory.

Number Memory the ability to learn, remember and use non-associated material such as raw data and numbers.

Visual Speed & Accuracy the ease and speed with which an individual processes and interprets new written data; advantageous in fields that require instant recall of statistics.

Personal style

Generalist A generalist is an individual in the upper percentiles of the generalist/ specialist scale. Seventy-five percent of the general population fall into this range. Generalists derive energy from working in groups and are intuitive about the reactions of others. They like to undertake a variety of tasks and enjoy contributing to the execution of a group project.

Specialist Individuals at the lower end of the generalist/specialist scale are called specialists. Specialists make up one in every four individuals. Specialists prefer to work and solve problems independently. They like to study a project in depth and to contribute from their own perspectives.

Extrovert Extroverts score in the upper percentiles of the extrovert/introvert scale. An extrovert gets energy from interacting with other people. An extrovert may not enjoy a project on which he or she is required to work alone e.g. writing a long report. Extroverts process information by talking about it.

Introvert Introverts score in the lower percentiles in the scale measuring extroversion/ introversion. Introverts prefer either to work alone or to work with other people one-on-one or in clearly structured circumstances. Introverts process information by thinking about it.

Time Frame Orientation Measures the individual's comfort with future projects and goals. People are divided into short-term. Mid-term and long-term time frames. An individual with short-term orientation will want to work with tasks and problems that can be finished within a short period, i.e. in a few months. An individual with mid-term orientation will seek tasks and problems that have implications for other projects over a longer period, i.e. one-four years, an individual with long-term orientation prefers to work on long-term projects that require strategic planning and execution of more distant goals.

Vocabulary

This is an acquired skill rather than a natural ability. It determines the range of people with whom you interact most easily and naturally. It is considered easier to interact and share ideas with people who are similar to you in vocabulary than almost any other group.

Since vocabulary is not ability you can change your vocabulary level with study and concentration. It is an achievement score and is included because of its enormous impact in the workplace

If your score is low there are a number of suggestions we can offer to help you develop this.