Understanding Evaluation

1. What rationales do learning professionals offer for not evaluating instructional efforts? Are these rationales ever valid? Why? When?

The rationales learning professionals use for not evaluating instructional efforts are time, expense, expertise, and history. None of these are reasons for not evaluating instructional efforts. If someone really wanted to know how well their training is doing, then you would make time to find out. Expense shouldn’t be a factor because you use expenses to create the training in the first place. If you don’t care enough to want to evaluate how well your training is, then you waste money. When you evaluate something, you don’t have to be an expertise, but as a person in a position of authority you have enough experience to know how well training can be. As far as history goes, history is not always right. Even if you have “always” been successful with your current learning program, there is “always” room for improvement.

2. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: "The only criteria that really mean anything are criteria related to employee learning." Why do you agree or disagree? Support your stance.

This statement has two sides. Yes, this statement is true when you evaluate how employees take to new training that is given to them. If you want to know if the employee task completion has improved, then you would evaluate your employee learning. On the other hand if you are looking to promote someone within the company, then criteria related to employee learning would be irrelevant. It really depends on the situation.

3. The learning and performance department of Valentin Computers has completed a needs assessment and identified a group of employees who need to learn project management skills. How would you go about identifying relevant evaluation criteria?

After comparing the assessments, use the categories with the lowest scores or lowest performance evaluation to determine which criteria would be relevant.