TEACHING COLLEGE STUDENTS HOW TO ANSWER INTERVIEW QUESTIONS: CONTENT, FLUENCY, AND SOCIAL VALIDITY

Poor interview performance may be one factor contributing to the unemployment and underemployment of recent college graduates, and content and fluency of interview answers seem to be especially important. Although decades of research have shown improvements in interview skills using instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, researchers have noted that the duration of training could limit the practicality of using these procedures in college classrooms or career centers. Additional time could be saved if teaching one skill led to collateral changes in another. Although previous research reported collateral changes in speech disfluencies after targeting elements of answer content (Hollandsworth et al., 1978), this study examined the reliability, validity, and generality of these findings. Training effects were evaluated using simulated interviews with the experimenter acting as the interviewer. To evaluate the durability of changes in answer content and fluency, students participated in simulated interviews one week after completing training (maintenance) and with an individual who frequently conducts interviews before and after training (generality). Answer content improved for all 3 participants after only 2 training sessions, and these improvements maintained after a week and during generality probes. However, there were no collateral improvements in speech disfluencies