Assessment That Aids & Measures Learning

Assessment makes training what it is intended to be. Mere presentation of information - without assessment of what the participants have gathered from what the trainer has presented to them - is not training. So assessment of learning is very much an integral part of training.

For the assessment to aid the learning process and to be a measurement of what the participants have gained, we (CEDR) have been designing the assessments with these principles in mind.

When we assess participants’ learning, we could refer to two items as reference: the norm (other participants’ achievements) or a set of criteria.

Norm-referencing - participants are compared against other participants. In a group of participants, the top 5% gets ‘A’s, the next 10% gets ‘B’s, etc and the bottom 50% fails.
Criterion-referencing - participants are assessed / measured against certain fixed criteria.

Which type of referencing do we use? We favour the criterion-referencing approach as we feel it is fairer - everyone has the opportunity to obtain a good assessment results which can motivate learning. In our training sessions, the purpose of assessment is not to identify high/low achievers but rather to spur all participants to be competent (according to the set criteria).

Of course, sometimes during the training session, we may have quizzes/ competitive group exercises (norm-referencing) - just to add the element of friendly competition. It is amazing how kiasu (competitive) some people can be during these times! But it is all in good fun and the kiasu spirit does motivate participants to learn and to practise the skills being trained.

Assessment is important to the process of learning; be it informal or formal assessment. At CEDR, we recognise this and are constantly working on improving the ways that we design the assessments so that they will aid participants’ learning as well as measure their learning outcome.