Assessment: What Are You Measuring, Anyway?

As an elearning manager, I have reviewed a lot of elearning during my career. Much of it dumps content out there followed by multiple choice questions. If training is learning new skills, then why aren't we testing the skills they are supposed to learn in our programs?  What is the difference between what we do and what marketers do in content marketing? As Harold Stolovich would say, "Tellin' ain't trainin' and trainin' ain't performance." 

After considerable noodling, I've come up with four reasons why we assess learning so poorly.

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Hypothesis 1

We don't know what we are supposed to measure

It's easy to write multiple choice questions. They are quick to craft and program. But they usually only test remembering, which is at the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy. 

If we spend our time crafting outcomes and objectives, then supposedly build our training around them, why aren't we measuring to those goals?

Maybe we don't know we should.

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Hypothesis 2

It's hard to measure things in elearning

Yes, it requires a little more thinking to find creative ways to measure skills using an online function. But that doesn't mean you can't. If I am teaching a course to students learning to use a piece of software, shouldn't they be able to use it at the end? I can't tell you how many times I have seen multiple choice, text based questions asking about buttons at the end of these courses. There is no context, and no pictures. What is that helping?

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