Assessment
(SOO-purr-vEYE-zor SUH-port)
LIQUID
What is Assessment?
An assessment is an instrument used to measure individual skills, knowledge gain, retention, or learning program effectiveness.
Other Common Names
Other common names for assessment include:
- Test
- Quiz
Key Properties
Assessment is an attempt to determine the effectiveness of a learning initiative and has the following core properties:
- It may involve qualitative or quantitative measures.
- It is targeted to provide a snapshot of whether learning objectives have been accomplished.
Insights from What’s Your Formula? that will be on the test!
- "We all want to be liked, adored even. We want to be told our work is amazing. When it comes to training programs, comments like this are certainly nice to hear. (I won’t ever argue with someone who shares this feedback with me!). The more important question, however, is how do we know the program was effective? For the answer, we need to adopt the element of assessment."
- "The element of assessment can be an extremely broad concept and can include all sorts of methods, from formal quizzes or certification exams to informal participant observations or quiz games like Jeopardy."
Elements that easily bond with Assessment
Audience Response
Using real-time audience response activities to poll your participants can help you determine their prior knowledge of a subject or it can give you insights into how much they have learned, depending on the timing of the activity. Keep in mind that polling your audience is a “soft” measure that is often done anonymously to provide an overall trend of where your participants stand, but it is often difficult to use polling data to assess the learning or skill development of individuals.
Quiz Software
Using quiz software allows you to assess how much individuals or groups have learned, often in a fun (sometimes competitive) way. Whether you’re using an online platform such as Kahoot or you’ve created a Jeopardy-like game using PowerPoint, quizzing your participants allows you to take a snapshot of knowledge learned at a given point in your session. While knowledge checks alone may not give you the entire picture of overall program effectiveness, they do offer some data on whether participants are growing their knowledge base.
Games
Quiz games offer insights into knowledge gain. Inspiration can also be drawn from role-playing games or escape room–type activities in which individuals or small groups need to debate the merits of their decisions in order to proceed through the game, which offers greater insights into critical thinking, decision making, and teamwork.
GamesInstructional Design
This has and will be said many times throughout this book, but I have no qualms about repeating myself on this point. If you’re planning to assess the effectiveness of a training program, it needs to be baked into the design of the program from the beginning. What baseline data will you capture in your needs assessment to help you answer the question, “Why are we doing this training and how will we know it’s effective?” Using well-crafted learning objectives will help you design activities and assessment strategies to determine the effectiveness of your program.
Levels of Evaluation
In addition to capturing comments such as “best training ever” and “room was too cold,” post-training evaluation forms can offer participant reactions on how confident
they are as they complete your training program and set out to use new knowledge or skills in the real world. Pre- and post-testing can offer you some insights as to whether new knowledge was gained, although the asterisk with this measure is that post-tests are often conducted right after participants have learned a concept. The forgetting curve can wreak havoc on post-test results, so if you really want to assess training effectiveness in terms of knowledge gained using post-testing, you should wait a week to administer the test. Gathering information about participants post-training performance and transfer of skills onto the job can provide insight into on-the-job effectiveness if you survey participants (or their supervisors) 30 or 60 days after the program has been completed.
Role Play
While many participants will groan at the mention of role play, if it is designed well this element can offer key insights as to whether your participants can say the right words and react in an appropriate manner during a real-life simulation.
E-learning
On the surface this may be an odd element to bond with assessment since e-learning is typically thought of as a training method or even distribution channel for dispersed groups of learners. However, e-learning can hold a natural assessment advantage over other forms of training delivery because many LMSs capture all sorts of data that can be used to assess the effectiveness of the program. The key here is building those means of assessment into the design of the course and then ensuring your LMS can capture the data you want.
Other Sources of Information on Assessment
Books on Assessment
