Leadership Training Chapter 9 – Testing for Comprehension

Chapter 9 – Testing for Comprehension

“Hey! Do You Understand?”

Let’s ask the worst two questions in any training:

1. Do you understand?
2. Are there any questions?

Your work as a trainer is to transfer knowledge to students and trainees. Your job as a trainer is to be sure your students understand, retain, and can use the
knowledge.

Testing comprehension throughout your training is important, and creating an expectation that students will be tested is also important. But it must be done in a way that supports learning, not in a way that creates fear or anxiety in the room.

The easiest way to test comprehension is to ask questions. The two most common types of questions are closed ended and open ended questions.

Closed-Ended Questions

Closed-ended questions are generally used in written scenarios, particularly when being machine graded. The most common closed-ended questions are multiple choice and true/false. It is very important that closed-ended questions do not have ambiguous answers, like:

The sky is:

1. Blue
2. Cyan
3. Red
4. Azure

If you are going to do something like this, then you must allow multiple correct answers. It is much better to create questions that are completely objective, so the answer is either correct or not…no judgement. In an oral situation, closed-ended questions promote guessing, like in, “Is the sky cyan or blue?” If you are trying to elicit some dialog around the topic, this might be a good question, but not if you are trying to find out if someone knows what color the sky is.

Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions encourage your trainees to think. Often these questions are about how something works, or why something works. It is difficult for students to hide behind guessing on open-ended questions, so this type of question is generally better for assessment than closed-ended questions.

Open-ended questions can also be a statement that requires completion, like “The sky is blue because ______________.”

Open ended-questions may require some interpretation to discern correct answers and there may be multiple shades of correct answers depending on how well the person taking the assessment really knows the material. Look for answers that are concise and clear.

Designing Questions

When designing questions, first determine what you are testing. Using levels of learning is a good place to start. You can specifically ask questions about:

• Rote – Show me that you can do something.
• Understanding – How does something work?
• Application – Why does something work?
• Correlation – What happens in a new situation?

Critiques

Critiques, or open discussions, can have several good results. You discover how well your group understands the material by the sophistication of the questions and comments. You can also use critiques as a way to open dialog about new topics. It is important during critiques to keep the room on target. It is very easy for the conversation to go sideways. If you have time to explore these tangents, then critique is a great way to do it. If you do not have the time, this is a great way to lose control of your class.

EXERCISE – TESTING STUDENT COMPREHENSION

Break into teams. Choose any topic you feel qualified to teach. Create five closed-ended questions that can be used in an online course. Create five open-ended questions that can be used during the lecture portion of an in-person class. Create a short lecture about your topic and ask the open-ended questions during the lecture. At the conclusion of the lecture, give your students the closed-ended questions. Create metrics from the answers then revise your questions as appropriate.