As an alternative to traditional multiple-choice assessment, Certainty Based Marking (CBM) helps employees to learn in a more confident, considered and comprehensive way. The reasons for this – outlined in our blog post Certainty Based Marking and how it improves employee training – are that it requires learners to indicate the certainty of their answers and uses a scoring scale that encourages honesty in doing so.
Understanding why CBM works is one thing, though, but that doesn’t necessarily help you to implement it in your organisation. The theory gives no explanation of how Certainty Based Marking can be delivered or how organisations can roll it out to employees.
Arguably the quickest, easiest and most productive means of rolling out Certainty based Marking in a workplace is to use an e-learning platform that has the functionality already built in. Wranx is, of course, one such platform, but there are others out there.
Because e-learning platform assessment suits multiple-choice assessment of one sort or other (rather than assessments with text-based responses), CBM is easy to integrate. What’s more, the questions need not look much different to traditional multiple-choice questions.
As with traditional multiple-choice assessment, a question and a choice of four answers are presented. In addition, though, learners are given a choice of three buttons to indicate how certain they are that their answer is correct. Both parts of the answer are combined to give the learner a score depending on whether their answer is right or wrong.
At the end of a drill or test, not only will the learner’s score give an aggregated insight into their knowledge about and confidence in a topic, it can also be used as a benchmark for future testing. With e-learning platforms able to easily store performance data, compare it against previous data and visualise it in different ways, the insights gained from Certainty Based Marking can be used to track learning performance continuously.
