Consider the following scenario: A new hire has just completed all onboarding training and the assessments confirm that he’s a star. You send him to the front lines with great expectations. Unfortunately, when potential clients ask specific questions, he is unable to remember many of the product details he learned during training. He achieves few leads and no new clients. What happened? He breezed through training, right? 

The reality is that many employees know more about how to pass a test and progress through training than they know how to internalize and access applicable knowledge. In other words, they easily pass assessments but are sorely lacking in a real-world situations. 

Before you consider this scenario a rare event, remember there is an entire test-passing industry teaching students how to look at exams solely as a point system, as opposed to an opportunity to measure their actual knowledge. One of the techniques is how to make guesses. An employee that knows how to guess well can pass nearly any training module, but he will likely be totally unprepared for the job. 

Enter Learning Confidence Assessments 
-------------------------------------- 

So, is there any way to assess how an employee might actually perform in real-world situations? This is where assessing learner confidence can help. As opposed to the one-dimensional assessment tool of a knowledge grade, adding learner confidence shines a light on an important second dimension of the employee’s capabilities. Learner confidence shows what knowledge employees are more likely to _act on—_not just test well on. 

When an employee correctly answers a question and reports high confidence in that answer, they are indicating to you that they can apply that information on the job. Conversely, if an employee correctly answers a question, but reports low confidence in their answer, they are not likely to ever use that information. They are indicating guesswork, and that they haven’t internalized the knowledge. 

How to Measure Learner Confidence 

Here’s the good news: adding learner confidence measurements isn’t all that difficult. Most e-learning platforms are robust enough to add a variable that will measure the learner’s confidence in their answers. After each question, you can add a scale that the employee uses to rate the confidence they have in their answer. A scale between 1 and 6 can sufficiently report the employee’s confidence level. 

Here a few tips for implementing this practice into your training modules.  

1. Make it explicit to the employee that high confidence will not help them pass the assessment they are taking. You want honest answers. If you tell them it affects their grade, confidence scores are likely to be skewed upwards.

2. It’s important to ask employees to rate their confidence on each answer. Just one confidence assessment at the end of a training test will be too blunt of an instrument to pinpoint areas of weakness.

3. Remember that your goal is to have employees with high knowledge scores coupled with high confidence scores. This indicates mastery of a subject, which is your long-term goal. Just because an employee isn’t there now, doesn’t mean they won’t get there eventually.

4. All assessment tools are imperfect to some degree. It’s important to remember that while measuring confidence can give you valuable information, low scores can also indicate that the employee has test anxiety. It takes awareness on the part of the instructor to look out for that. 

5. Remember that measuring learner confidence isn’t just about company performance, it’s about employee growth as well. Not only will more confident employees help your bottom line, they will be happier as well. It’s a win-win.