PRE/POST TRAINING ASSESSMENT

We’re keen on assessing learner knowledge before and after any training as it’s important for a number of reasons.

We’ve often found that clients typically will determine training effectiveness by:

1. Only Post-assessment measures - a knowledge quiz after training to demonstrate how well the learners have remembered (and sometimes demonstrated) their learning.

2. Assuming it will be picked up by some global performance metric that already exists in the business (like NPS in the case of a service related training initiative).

With either of the above choices, its difficult to determine the specific impact of your training.

Did the learners come with a good knowledge of your content already?

Did other organisational changes contribute to an uplift in performance?

A Pre-assessment is helpful for a number of reasons.

• It acknowledges our learners are coming “to the table” with knowledge, skills and attitudes gained from past experience and gives them the opportunity to demonstrate what they know upfront.

• It allows identification of any common knowledge gaps before any training begins (which hopefully will be filled by your learning content).

• It can also stimulate learners’ curiosity which creates an interest in them to engage with the course.

Once you have the Pre-assessment sorted, you can add a post assessment quiz to determine whether the learner’s knowledge gap has decreased (which of course is a goal of the training).

When developing pre-assessments, it’s important to ensure that the assessment benchmarks not only current KNOWLEDGE, but also current BEHAVIOUR.

Below is an example of a pre/post quiz we developed for a client in the fitness sector.

Note how many of the questions are assessing what the learner would DO in a given situation, rather than simply what they KNOW.

This quiz was authored in Typeform - a great option that sits outside of an LMS.

Typeform has some great inbuilt data analytics, so it’s perfect for gathering and analysing data to determine whether your training is having a positive impact in the real life of the learner.

Everything comes back to how behaviour changes after any learning opportunity.

Ultimately we’ll be wanting to measure how the training effects “on the job” performance - and we might do this through observation checklists and detailed performance reviews.

During the learning though, we’re always on the lookout for opportunities to include simulations and case studies, as these are a great stepping stone to learners being able to demonstrate their learning in real life situations.