HURIER Listening Self Assessment - Essay Example

Your F. 22 January HURIER Listening Self Assessment It was interesting to uncover the areas of listening in which I needed to improve out of the basic six components of listening that the textbook identified including Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating and Responding. When completing my HURIER Listening Assessment (Brownell, 2010), I projected that I would have the best ranking in the category of Remembering and would rank lowest in Evaluating. When it came down to the results following the HURIER listening self assessment assignment, I had predicted correctly that my best component would be Remembering but it was tied with also tied with the Hearing component for first in rank. However, my actual lowest area was Interpreting rather than Evaluating which came in next to last. I guess I knew myself better than I realized and can recognize that I am good at remembering and recalling but have other areas to work on. In actuality, I recognize that I am good at remembering things and as far as my educational setting, I am definitely better at listening than I am a visual learner. When scoring myself on the HURIER self-assessment of listening, I was hard on myself. I never gave myself a single five-point score on any of the questions which correlated with the “almost always” answer. However, I also never gave myself a one-rating on anything either which correlated with “almost never.” My scoring instead, I mostly gave myself primarily '4' ratings that coordinated with the “usually” response. I think in some ways that not giving myself any '5' ratings indicates that I acknowledge that I am not the best listener, and I would guess hardly anyone would be so hard on themselves to honestly say that they “almost never...” do something (whatever that something is) in accordance to listening. No one wants to admit that they are poor listeners or at least have certain faults among the six components of listening. My personal results were as follows in according to rank, with the top ranking component that is my best is Remembering which is tied with Hearin. Understanding and Responding are tied for third and fourth rank with 22 points each; the Evaluating component is ranked fifth; and my lowest is Interpreting coming in at sixth rank with a total of 17 points that I gave myself. According to the individual points, the HURIER listening profile broke it down for me that anything from 25-30 points indicated that the person was an excellent listener. I did not rank myself in any of the six components to have a high enough score to be considered “excellent” in any area of listening. This is evident that I can improve on all levels of listening. In most areas, I fell into the “you believe you are a good listener,” area and only in Interpreting did I have “adequate” listening skills. Some questions that I scored myself very low are areas that I need to think about more in accordance with not just listening but in overall other aspects and variables that may relate to listening. One question “I take into account the speaker's personal and cultural perspective when listening to him.” I ranked myself a 2 on that question and realize that maybe I should be a little more open-minded about people before I consider whether or not I should listen to them. I also scored myself a 2 on the question that “I am sensitive to the speaker's tone of voice in communication situations.” Again, maybe I am not so good at being empathetic to a person that is talking. Those are the only questions that I scored myself a 2 on. I can tell that sometimes when someone is saying something, if I start to blank out to what they are saying, I do not respond correctly but it can be difficult when someone drones on and on about something that is uninteresting to me. I think that sometimes when taking assessments of this nature, we have the tendency to believe that we listen, interpret, understand and remember better than we really do. If I were really tested on these skills, base on something other than just my thoughts, more of a scientific method of research, if I would really have similar results. I do my best to listen and luckily, I am good at remembering things. However, for example, when taking tests, I can have a hard time recalling something that a professor said. I have problems remembering what other people tell me too. I think that an assessment of this type is good to help us reflect on our areas of how to listen and areas to improve but looking over this, I do not know how honest I really was with myself. I did not acknowledge that I was really good in one area and really bad in another. That is why self-assessment of listening is not really a valid interpretation of how well I actually listen. One website I found discussed the different types of listening and included: Discriminative listening, Comprehension listening, Critical listening, Biased listening, Evaluative listening, Appreciative listening, Sympathetic and Empathetic listening, Therapeutic listening, Dialogic listening and Relationship listening (Changing Minds, 2011). If listening is that far broken down, it makes me wonder how I would compare in these various different groups? One goal that I would like to make for myself to improve on that was one that I scored myself lower on and is one listed in the additional reference information is that of Discriminative listening. I do not recognize a person's voice changes or pay attention to them in regards to my own personal sensitivity. I would also like to work more on actually interpreting what I hear, listen to and then make sense of it and recognize it as my second goal to try to pay more attention and gather more details to fill in any context clues when listening to someone else so I can determine perhaps what emotion they are trying to provoke or how I should correctly respond in a one-on-one or small group communication situation. My third goal to improve on is to not only listen to a person's voice variations, but to also take a better look at interpersonal communication skills that are conveyed through body language including facial expressions, posture and other nonverbal behaviors. I think that taking in everything around me and truly making myself take note of these areas, I will find that I will become a much better listener all the way around. This will then in turn reflect in all areas of listening and make me become a more effective communicator and listener. Works Cited Brownell, Judi. “Your HURIER Listening Profile.” Listening, Attitudes, Principles and Skills. Boston, Massachusetts, 2010. Print. “Types of Listening.” ChangingMinds. 2011. Web. 22 Jan. 2012. Read More