How to Evaluate a Training

Evaluation Checklist

Do you ever get emails asking you to spend a few minutes sharing your thoughts about evaluating a training? I do. And I'm always a little torn because I know whoever asks is eager for a few crisp tips. Instead, I grill them with questions!

The rest of this short blog post is about questions:  questions to ask somebody if they ask you about how to evaluate a training.

Question #1 – When you say evaluate, are you looking for feedback (i.e. how people perceived their experience) or learning (i.e. how well people grasped the skills/ knowledge/ attitudes being "taught") or something more (see Q4 below on the topic of something more)?

Question #2 – If you are looking for feedback, is it primarily on the design of the training (i.e. course content, structure, sequence, relevance) or on the facilitation (i.e. the way the facilitator listened, guided the dialogue, posed questions, etc)? What kind of feedback will you be able to make use of in the future?

Question #3 –  If you are looking to evaluate learning, have you set clear objectives against which to evaluate?  Are those objectives written in such a way that you – and the learner – will KNOW when they've been achieved?

Side bar:  I just watched a presentation by Dr. James Zull, author of "The Art of Changing the Brain." His words echoed those of our very own Dr. Jane Vella when he said "The way we know we know is if our back cortex (area of sensory input) senses an action we initiate with our front cortex (area of motor skills)."  I loved hearing that because it made the biology of learning evaluation so crystal clear. We know it was learned when we did something with it. That's what achievement-based objectives set us up for!

Question #4 – (With this question I draw a little diagram showing how learning leads to transfer, and transfer leads to impact.) If you are looking for something more, then you probably want to evaluate "transfer" (i.e. how learners use what they got in the learning) or "impact" (i.e. what difference it made to them or those around them). If so, have you set up a plan to capture evidence of learning and then track what happens after the training ends?

By the time I hit question #4, the caller usually pauses their note-taking and says something like "Hmmm. I guess I have to think this through a bit more.” And that's when I feel like I've done my work for the day.

What do you say when a colleague asks you to spend a few minutes talking to them about training evaluation? Share it with us in the comments section.

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