This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The eighth of ten 'insights' is that �Assessment is changing', in the sense that assessment of knowledge is not enough - it is performance that matters.
By and large, employers are not really interested in their employees having knowledge; they want them to be able to fulfil their job responsibilities, and to do that they must be competent. Competence will depend to some degree on the knowledge that employees have, but it will also be underpinned by attitudes, skills and the confidence to put these into practice.
Automated, computer-based assessment does a pretty good job of testing for knowledge and certain cognitive skills, but it is going to tell you nothing about a person's attitude, interpersonal skills or motor skills (unless you've got some pretty impressive simulator doing the job). So, in the majority of cases, the multiple-choice quiz placed at the end of an e-learning module is going to tell you very little that matters (and even when the objectives are for simple knowledge transfer, this is far too early to provide any meaningful evidence).
E-assessment is tempting because it is automated and cheap, but to believe that this is a useful measure of competence is a delusion (some may say a conspiracy of mutual delusion - if you don't tell anyone, then I won't). The best way to measure competence is through observation of actual job behaviour, something which most managers do routinely. So, to assess competence, however derived (through formal, informal or experiential learning), you need simply to ask managers whether their direct reports are exhibiting the desired competence. If you're looking to make this process as efficient as possible, create an online questionnaire and have your LMS (or some other platform) send out a link to this a month or so after the learning intervention has been completed. Simple.
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