Using Assessments to Gain Valuable Feedback

When you facilitate a course or program, how do you know whether participants are actually processing and learning the content? How important is it to find out, and what would you do with the results if you knew them?

If your focus is truly on how well participants are learning rather than on reporting results back to management, for example, then using assessments can be an excellent tool for soliciting feedback. Assessments can be simple or complex, they always involve learner participation, and they are formative and context-specific.

Here are a few examples of simple assessment techniques:

• At the end of a session or segment of content, ask participants to spend just one minute writing answers to these two questions: What was the most important thing you learned? What questions do you still have? Alternately, ask participants to write a short response to the question: What was most unclear about this session/segment of content?
• If you have presented content that it is important for participants to be able to summarize and apply to a particular situation, ask them to write a one-sentence summary explaining the relevant who, what, when, where, why, and how. For example, you could assess participants’ understanding of how to give difficult feedback to direct reports.
• Alternately, you could ask participants to paraphrase a concept or procedure you have just presented, keeping a specific audience in mind. For example, if you have just facilitated a session on effective communication, ask participants to rephrase the concept in a way that would be meaningful to teammates or direct reports who aren’t in attendance.

If you’re going to use an assessment, it’s a good idea to to tell participants ahead of time that you’ll be doing so and to explain why so that you get their buy-in. It’s also best to keep their responses anonymous. Try to review feedback in a timely manner and to share it with participants. This could be as simple as saying, “Five of you still have questions about how to use the chat tool to engage learners in a virtual environment. Let’s take a few minutes to look at that again because it’s important.”

In conducting the assessment and sharing the results with your participants, you are communicating the importance you place on their acquisition of knowledge. You are also more deeply engaging participants and giving them a specific opportunity to participate in the feedback process. Most people like to give feedback, particularly when they see an immediate benefit from doing so.

One last note: Assessments don’t have to be limited to courses and programs. You could use them as part of regular team meetings or forums or even brown bag lunches. Think about a specific piece of content that you facilitate. How you could use a simple assessment in conjunction with that content to benefit participants?

This information is presented from “Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers,” Second Edition, by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross. For more information about assessments, including a comprehensive list of assessment methods that can be adapted for use in any environment, refer to the book.