For organisations that are keen to develop their employees, it’s important to know how to evaluate training effectiveness. Being able to do so allows organisations to identify what works well and subsequently refine the training they provide. It also requires organisations to assess the learning performance of their employees.
As well as knowing what is required to do this effectively and how to put it into practice, organisations need the right tools. These can be built into e-learning platforms, but the features offered by different platforms can vary. There are some e-learning features that are crucial for effective assessment, though.
Assessment tests
Obviously, assessing your employees with tests helps to establish how well they are learning and how effective training is proving to be. Such assessments are typically delivered at key points in the learning experience, such as at the end of individual modules or full programmes.
Training assessment tests can of course vary in what form they take. The key thing, though, is that both the test format and the test content are appropriate for the training subject matter. Multiple-choice tests are one format that is widely used and adapted as required, but it’s important that answer options require learner consideration and are not too obvious.
Certainty Based Marking
Of course, one problem with traditional multiple-choice assessment is that individuals can choose an option at random if they don’t know the answer to a question and still get it right. As explained in our blog post about Certainty Based Marking, this not only results in a poor reflection of training effectiveness, but can leave learners ill-prepared in future through their not actually having the required knowledge.
Certainty Based Marking requires that, not only must learners indicate which possible answer they think is correct, they must also indicate how certain they are that their chosen answer is correct. Higher marks are awarded for more confident correct answers and less confident incorrect answers, meanwhile, encouraging learners to be honest about their knowledge level. As a result, individuals learn in a more comprehensive and rounded way.
Analytics reporting
For assessment to be truly effective in helping to refine how training is delivered, it must be possible for organisations to get insights into learner performance on both an individual and organisation-wide level. By presenting learning performance analytics information, it’s possible for e-learning platforms to show how learner performance is progressing over time.
On an individual level, this makes it possible to see the areas in which learners are excelling and the areas in which they need more work, as well as how learning performance has changed over time and what this means in terms of what approaches are best suited to different individuals. By extrapolating this information to an organisation-wide level, it’s possible to see what learning techniques and approaches are working for workforces as a whole and for organisations to adapt accordingly.
