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Knowledge Check
July 21, 2008
By Margery Weinstein
How do you know you're getting the biggest bang for your training dollars? A skills check-up may be the answer.
"We want to make sure we're getting value for our training spend," says Andrew Wolf, director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' (PwC) educational methods group, which includes the firm’s evaluation assessments team. "So for all our self-studies, and for many of our classroom [courses], we go back in, we test, and we will try to come back, on select cases, to do [job skills] transfer testing, as well, and make sure even after the classroom experience is done, some months down the road, that learning actually took place."
As with any meaningful knowledge assessment, there are repercussions at PwC for not passing. "We don't award our continuing professional education credit unless the learner can pass the test," he says of the compulsory assessments that follow the firm's self-study courses. A class on accounting technical information, for instance, in which the firm needs to ensure learners understand the latest accounting regulations, is followed by a test on those new laws. That test includes both questions to determine basic understanding of the new laws, as well as a portion of the assessment that determines whether the learner knows how to apply those new laws to his or her work. "Let's give you a problem, and see if you can get to the right answer to it," Wolf says of typical application-based questions. "In some courses, especially more of our senior courses, we'll throw in some questions [that ask if] can you apply the information in a newer and novel instance." PwC knows its accountants need to understand the new laws, as well as reliably apply them, so its assessment tells the firm's trainers precisely what they need to know.
The course objectives are, in fact, the right place to start when designing an assessment, says Eric Shepherd, CEO of assessment management system provider QuestionMark. "If you don't know what the learning objectives are, you don't stand a chance," he says. "Those learning objectives are the topics—how much we want people to learn about a particular subject." From there, you need to prioritize, taking care to ask the greatest number of questions about what you've decided are the most important points of the course. "So a lot of thinking goes into it," says Shepherd of the process of constructing a valid assessment. "It's like with a lot of teaching and learning, the more thinking you do upfront, the better the outcome."
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