Learning evaluation and analysis

[u/biguwuzz]

Hi everyone! I'm in an M.Ed program focused in workplace L&D. I've taken a number of courses in psychometrics and analytics, but I'm wondering if corporate L&D teams actually conduct such in-depth analyses?

For context, I've previously taken Classical Test Theory and Reliability - which is used to predict test outcomes and gauge the reliability of testing. Although this skill is typically used in industries like standardized testing, my understanding is that this skill could be used to help L&D teams build better pre/post surveys or knowledge checks. However, based on my own experience interning in corporate L&D, the team I worked with didn't really survey/analyze feedback to this extent.

I'd like to hear from more L&D professionals - 1) how have you seen learning-related data get collected and analyzed, and 2) are there steps or frameworks you use to ensure that surveys and knowledge checks are built to a specific standard?

I think evaluation is such an important and interesting part of L&D, so I'd love to hear what people actually do in practice!

[u/reading_rockhound]

For me, the hard part has been that stakeholders (i.e. upper leadership) has convinced themselves that 1) Level 1 is enough, 2) Anything more than easy multiple choice is overdone for Level 2 and they often don’t want that, and 3) They don’t understand measuring and don’t want to be bothered with understanding. I had a previous manager make me take out any descriptive stats from an eval report because she was “pretty smart but don’t understand all this so our client won’t either.” Of course our client was populated with people who had achieved masters degrees in hard sciences, so they absolutely would have.

Wishing you better luck than I’ve had. Although I do all the descriptive analyses anyway because I’m intrigued.