Imagine you need to teach aspiring electricians how to wire a connection. How can you tell they’ve mastered this skill? Would you ask multiple-choice questions about the history of electricity? You could. However, these types of knowledge-based questions wouldn’t measure the learner’s writing skills.
Skill-based assessments are essential to measuring the learner’s competency and whether they have the skills needed to do the job required. However, since they can be tricker than knowledge-based assessments, creating practical assessments that measure skills might seem daunting. In this blog, we will discuss some tips and tricks to develop skill-based assessments that effectively measure the competency of your learners.
Where to begin
First, your assessment needs to align with the training program’s learning objectives. If you find yourself struggling to define your objective, then start. Explain what the learner should be able to do by the end of the training program. From there, state that objective as something observable that can be assessed.
And, going in tandem with your objectives, you also have to define the skills that need to be assessed. Depending on the job or course, these could be technical, cognitive, or interpersonal. Let’s return to the example we used about an electrician training program. If you built a training module detailing how to wire a circuit, you’d want to ensure your learners knew how to perform that task. Thus, when identifying the various learning objectives, you might want to separate the knowledge and the skills-based objectives.
Designing the right questions
When designing the assessment questions, using Bloom’s Taxonomy is helpful. This is to say that you should create questions that measure the learners’ cognitive skills at six levels:
- Remembering: This level involves recalling basic information, such as facts, definitions, and concepts.
- Understanding: Here, learners demonstrate comprehension of the material by interpreting, explaining, and summarizing it.
- Applying: Learners apply their understanding of the material to solve problems, make predictions, or complete tasks.
- Analyzing: This level involves breaking down information into parts and examining how they relate.
- Evaluating: At this level, learners judge the quality or value of information, using criteria or standards to support their judgments.
- Creating: This involves generating new ideas or products based on previously learned information.
A skill may include knowledge areas. For example, an electrician must remember to identify the positive, negative, and ground wires. However, a practical skills-based assessment must measure the learner’s acting ability.
Authentic assessment tasks can make the assessment more effective. When teaching a skill, you need to teach exactly what the skill or task is. This requires the learner to apply their skills in a practical context. Interactive assessments are key to measuring the learners’ ability to apply their skills in this manner. You can design this interactivity in a variety of ways.
Remember our example where you built a training module with instructions on how to wire a circuit? A great assessment here might be a simulation where learners are tasked with applying the information they were just given to complete a task. Additionally, you could assess the learner’s knowledge around that task using a matching activity where learners need to place certain functions in the correct order or a sorting activity where they identify which tools they need for which jobs. However, a skills assessment must measure the learner’s ability to complete the tasks. This could be done using simulation, a monitored checklist, rubrics, etc. Remember to keep the learning objectives at the forefront and design assessments that measure those skills.
Assessment feedback
After or during the assessment, provide feedback to the learners. This will help reinforce their learning and identify areas for improvement. The feedback should be specific and provide suggestions for what they can do to perform better. Also, skills require practice, so make sure your strategy includes allowing learners to repeat the assessment, building their mastery.
Lastly, make sure that your assessment is valid and reliable. This means it measures what it should measure and produces consistent results. How can you measure this? If your learners consistently pass your skills-based assessment, but feedback from the job site is that they still cannot wire a circuit, this is a good indication that you need to revisit your training and assessment. You can also use technology to make the process more efficient, such as administering the evaluation online and using data analytics to analyze the results.
Takeaways
Creating skills-based assessments can seem daunting. But as we’ve shown, the process isn’t too different from creating other assessments. Like anything in eLearning, the learning objectives will dictate what you do here. The process becomes more straightforward by following solid objectives and heeding a few tips to creating skills-based questions, like Bloom’s taxonomy.
If you need additional help creating training that sticks, contact us for a free discovery call. And if you’re in the market for an LMS to host your training content, our Knowledge Direct platform can offer you just that, with our integrated testing and assessment engine. Contact us for a free trial.