Creating Pre- and Post-Assessments

A well-written pre-assessment allows you to figure out the gap in what your learners currently know and what you would like to them to know at the completion of the webinar. Fittingly, the post-assessment lets you know the extent to which your learners have grasped the content presented as aligned to the learning objectives for the lesson. Both are critical in assessing how well you’ve reached learning outcomes, and let you know what you need to do in terms of better reaching your students in future lessons.

Creating Pre-Assessment Activities

Pre-assessments sometimes get a bad rap because they’re seen as tests implemented before the lesson begins, which can bring anxiety to some learners. However, when delivered correctly, pre-assessments should be short and focused ^[1], allowing you to better tailor content to learner needs. Paola Domizio, in her article “Giving a Good Lecture,” posits that “if you cannot find out about your audience in advance, it is better to assume they know little or nothing and build up the lecture from the basics.” ^[2] While this is a solid best practice, pre-assessments take this guessing out of the equation and let you tailor your presentation exactly to the assessment needs laid out in your design plan.
Before you write your pre-assessment, you’ll want to ask yourself the following questions:

• What do you want or need your learners to know beforehand?
• Is it okay if there are wide variations in prior knowledge amongst learners?
• When do you need to collect this information? Before the lesson in a registration form? Or at the very beginning of the lesson?

You’ll want to create questions that will illuminate prior knowledge, and give you insight on the patterns in responses amongst your target audience rather than a strict list of “what they know” versus “what they don’t know.”

When you’re ready to deliver your pre-assessment, consider helping to mitigate learner anxiety by explaining that all learner types of various skill levels are welcome at the webinar. In addition, give the group ample time to complete the pre-assessment so that you have time to analyze the data. ^[3]

Creating Post-Assessment Activities

Because of the short amount of time available in most webinars, implementing a proposed assessment activity during the span of the lesson can be difficult. As such keep in mind that your post assessment should also be focused in short, and make sure to schedule time for the post assessment to be delivered, whether that’s during the webinar or shortly thereafter.

If you plan to conduct a post assessment mid-session, consider having participants summarize the main takeaways of the lesson and demonstrate how they apply those principles in their professional activities. In addition, you can use polling and quiz functions available in your system for online presentations as a means of measuring learning outcomes. Although most webinars do not have homework attached to them, if your learners are motivated to complete an exercise outside of the scope of the webinar, this can be analyzed as a post-assessment as well.

A post assessment embedded into a participant survey is often the choice of many presenters. In going this route, you are able to gather information to use after the session to improve the quality of instruction. In addition, you have the ability to make your audience feel as if their opinion is valued, and that their feedback will have an influence on future sessions. Make sure that as you create questions, that each are aligned to the pre-assessment questions, so that you can compare participant responses before and after the webinar. ^[4]