Assessment fear

James Cory-Wright investigates a common phobia amongst many learning and development professionals - the fear of assessment.

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A while ago I blogged on about video fear but here's another one. Fear of assessment. Or is it fear of measurement? Mention "assessment" and people seem to run a mile.

Try this conversation for size. The challenge is to create a set of regulations that need to be read and taken on board by all employees.

A: "Why not get people to read the pdf then spend most of your budget on developing a really thorough and varied assessment to test comprehension and retention?"
B: "OK I'm all for an assessment but how will we know they've actually read the pdf?"
A: "You mean through their eyes?"
B: "If it's an e-learning module we can track they've read the content"
A: "In their brain?"
B: "We can make sure they've clicked everything."
A: "With their fingers. Why can't we just judge them on whether they can pass the test?"
B: "But they can cheat."
A: "Like they can't pretend they've read an e-learning screen…"
B: "But you can track that."
A: "We can track the clicks."
B: "I hear what you're saying but I think that what we really want is a piece of e-learning. At least that way we'll know the user has clicked each page and we'll have a test at the end that confirms their completion for the record…"

What is there to be scared of?

The day is coming closer when it won't be about building e-learning courses from scratch, but a more 'informal' approach of self-directed learning by connecting up existing content from disparate existing sources such as powerpoints, pdfs, video, live online training sessions, existing e-learning courses, wikis, social media etc.

The measure of success for this - the glue that holds a self-directed approach together - will be rigorous and meaningful formal testing. Not tracking every click. Nor five tokenistic multiple choice questions. But comprehensive assessments of genuinely challenging questions testing recall and knowledge, scenario-led comprehension exercises testing interpretation, application and analysis of case studies.

You might also like:

• Resources: Learner centric design - a new frontier?
• Resources: Style and substance
• Resources: Video fear (and why we should overcome it)

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