Assessing Knowledge Transfer

The presentation is rolling right along, but how can you actually know if your participants are learning? One of the best ways to do so in a webinar format is the simplest – never underestimate the importance of simply asking. Surprisingly, many webinars fail to work in ample time to ask questions of the audience as a means of assessing understanding, and as such, have no way of gauging how well learners received the material.

When you formulate questions to ask your audience, consider all of the following rationales for soliciting feedback from your audience ^[1]:

• To check for comprehension
• To correct misconceptions or misunderstandings
• Explain points that were not made clear
• To encourage the development of critical thinking
• To give additional resources or related information
• To learn more about the students themselves

You can ask for simple yes/no responses to confirm understanding of procedural knowledge, such as “Give me a thumbs up using the status icons to let me know if you understand.”  You will probably want to ask for responses in the chat box or over the mic to confirm conceptual knowledge, such as  “Can you share an experience that you’ve had in the past that relates to this topic?” ^[2] Regularly check in on your participants to make sure that they are keeping up with you at every pass.

As you ask your participants to provide you information on the items listed above, be mindful of the time that you give them to offer responses.  People tend to take a moment before providing answers, and some students may need time to formulate questions of their own. ^[3] One of the benefits of having a dedicated website as a companion to your webinar is that you have a location to host questions and comments that may arise after the webinar has concluded.

When we talk about cognition, we should consider focusing on Bloom’s Taxonomy as we did in formulating a design plan.  Benjamin Bloom categorizes the cognitive domain as having an order of objectives – (from lowest to highest) knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.  ^[4] Asking questions that can help us to measure what users can recall will let us know about the lowest-order objective.  We should try to assess whether participants can use the information presented in a higher-order way such as analyzing and/or evaluating the information presented, or by creating something with that new knowledge.  Building your activities and assessment questions around this model will help to ensure deeper knowledge transfer amongst learners.