Assessments are often the expected conclusion to a course, class or training program. However, that same expectation has often led to generic question types, summative testing and delayed feedback. Assessments should be used as a way to ask learners to demonstrate what they’ve learned, and technology is continuing to enable this in powerful ways.
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Cognota Advanced Assessments which gives our clients the ability to include engaging, dynamic and customizable assessment questions in the flow of their training design and provide their learners with formative testing and immediate results.
Assessments are a strategy, not an activity so it’s important to think about the entire testing and assessment life cycle that Cognota Advanced Assessments helps to enable.
Design
For effective assessment design, it’s important that you establish exactly what you are trying to achieve with a particular assessment. Questions like the following are often used to help guide your thinking during the design process:
- Why am I assessing?
- What exactly am I trying to assess?
- How am I assessing learners? Should it be summative or formative assessment?
With Cognota Advanced Assessments, you’re guided to create your assessment questions when you establish your Learning Objectives. That way, it’s easy to ensure alignment between what you’re hoping for the learner to achieve and how you’ll measure it.
With Cognota Advanced Assessments, you’re guided to create your assessment questions when you establish your Learning Objectives. That way, it’s easy to ensure alignment between what you’re hoping for the learner to achieve and how you’ll measure it.
Within Cognota, you’re also able to collaborate at the micro-level, enabling your team to review and discuss each question during the design process.
Create
Adding your assessment questions is simple! You’ll select from the question category types: Multiple Choice, Fill in the Blanks, Classify, Match & Order and Hotspot and follow the steps to easily add your question, options, and correct answers.
We’ve got you supported throughout this process with our Support team accessible through chat and our comprehensive knowledge base.
Score
When considering your Assessment strategy, it’s important to think about how you’re going to score your learners. At the training project level, you’ll be able to manage the minimum passing score and completion messaging.
Assess
Once you’ve designed, created and collaborated on your training content, you’re ready to launch to your learners. As they complete each lesson, they’ll be presented with the assessments as they progress through the training – providing them timely feedback and measuring whether they are achieving the desired learning objectives as they go.
Measure
Integrating with your Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning
Record Score (LRS), you’ll be able to measure and report on your
learners’ results. You should also see this as an opportunity to measure
the effectiveness of your training content. Consider the following
questions:
- What did I want my learners to know?
- What did I want my learners to be able to do?
- How did I want my learners to be able to apply their knowledge?
Then by looking at the assessment results you can understand if your content is helping to support the Learning Objectives your assessments are measuring.
Why Advanced Assessments?
Trained instructional designers understand the value of aligning assessments with learning objectives (as two points in the Magic Triangle). However, with top performing organizations leveraging their Subject Matter Experts for content curation and design, allowing them to easily create engaging assessment questions that align with their learning objectives helps to remove bottlenecks in the design process without compromising quality.
In order to ensure that your training and assessments keep pace with the changing landscape of technology and your learners’ preferences and expectations, Scored Assessments give you an easy and scalable way to assess what matters, when it matters.
Advanced Assessments are available as an add-on feature for any Cognota client. If you’re interested in learning more, simply reach out to your Client Success Manager. If you aren’t a Cognota client and would like to see our Learning Design System with Assessments, we’d be happy to schedule a demo
