Behavioral Interview Questions

This activity can be used in a career planning or capstone seminar course, or can be used at the end of any disciplinary course to help students identify and reflect on the skills and dispositions the course activities helped them develop.
The activity is appropriate for use with both undergraduate and graduate students.

There are no skills that students need to master before participating in this activity.

I use this activity toward the end of a 1-credit career planning course for undergraduate geosciences majors (usually sophomore or junior level students).
I have also used this activity in a graduate seminar course for teaching assistant (TA) professional development to help TAs recognize some of the skills and dispositions they have developed through their TA duties.

The goal of the activity is to improve students' comfort answering behavioral interview questions and to help them identify and communicate the skills and dispositions they have.

This activity involves evaluating and synthesizing experiences with respect to key skills and dispositions.

This activity involves self reflection, self assessment, active listening, and communication.

This activity introduces the STAR method (situation, task, activity, results) for responding to behavioral interview questions and asks students to practice answering behavioral interview questions with a partner.
Students could be instructed to respond to the questions based on any experiences they have had or they could be instructed to respond to the questions based only on experiences in a particular course or context.

The activity includes slides to introduce the concept of behavioral interview questions and the STAR method, and set of "question cards" (to make it a fun game!), and a handout/template for organizing responses to interview questions.

behavioral interview questions slides (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 52kB Sep26 25)
Behavioral interview question cards (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 14kB Sep26 25) 
STAR template student handout (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 12kB Sep26 25) 

You can find many lists of behavioral interview questions on the internet. The ones included in the lesson were chosen for their perceived relevance to my teaching context. These would be easy to modify.

I formatted the question handout to be cut into individual "question cards" to make the activity more game-like, but the questions could also be provided as a list and students could choose two or three to answer that they thought were most relevant to the skills and dispositions they are developing.

After students have practiced answering two or three interview questions with a partner, you can ask students to share what they learned or noticed from the experience, share a particular response they heard that was compelling, have the class develop a collective list of the skills and dispositions they developed (if asking students to respond to the questions with experiences from a particular class), or identify additional practice that might be helpful.

I use this activity for formative assessment. If students participate in the activity and the class has a productive discussion to summarize what they have learned at the end, then I consider the goals of the activity to have been met.