5 Best Practices for Testing to Ensure Your Classes Work

Knowledge is usually a necessary first step to change actions — though it is often not sufficient by itself. While many nonprofits provide classes and training opportunities, we owe it to our clients to ensure that they are really learning. One of the most basic tools to allow you to gauge progress for a developmental class or program is a pre and post test. 

If you’re not using a curriculum with pre-made testing, you’ll have to design the test yourself. Here are five checks to ensure your test does what you need it to.

1) Ensure that your test focuses on your key learning objectives.

If you have an hour or two of instruction, you’ll probably only be asking 5-10 questions at the end. You need to ensure those questions are representative of the most important content covered. If you only test minor facts and technical terms from the content, you haven’t proven that clients have learned what matters. In general, you want to avoid testing vocabulary. Sometimes vocabulary is important, but usually, the concepts are more significant.

Start by asking yourself, “If learners remember how to do only a few things a year after the course, what do I want them to be?” Those elements should be your key learning objectives, you should emphasize them in the content, and test for them.

2) Determine the level of learning required—recognition vs. recall.

Recognition is a lower level of learning than recall. You may recognize a woman in the store, but not be able to recall her name. Multiple choice and true/false questions test recognition of the right answer. “Fill in the blank,” essays questions, and practical demonstrations test recall. Both levels of learning can be appropriate to test, but make sure you identify what level of learning you need for your learning objectives. 

For example, if you are trying to help a learner with vehicle maintenance basics, he doesn’t need to be able to draw a coolant temperature warning symbol from memory, he only needs to recognize it when he sees it.

On the other hand, it would be useful for him to recall from memory that when he sees the coolant temperature warning symbol, he should immediately pull over and turn off the engine.

Thus, a multiple-choice question is appropriate for the symbol identification and a short answer question is best for the action steps. There are higher levels of learning than recognition and recall which you can also explore—they are all mapped out in Bloom’s Taxonomy. This includes things like synthesizing multiple pieces of new information to navigate an unfamiliar scenario.

3) Ensure the test is difficult enough to gauge learning

When you are designing your test, give it to a few people who you think could benefit from the content of the course. If the average grade on a pretest is in the 70-100% range, then either your students already know your course material, or your test isn’t difficult enough to gauge it. Ideally, a pre-test will return results in the 0-70% range. If it’s too easy, consider changing some of the recognition questions to recall questions, or making the multiple-choice answers more difficult. You can also focus on any questions that nearly everyone gets right on the pre-test. Those questions should be replaced.

Once you establish that it is not possible to get a high score on your pre-test without knowing the material, then you can use the pre-test to gauge whether a prospective learner could benefit from the test. This ensures you don’t ask people to sit through a class they are unlikely to benefit from. Alternatively, you could ask that person to assist in teaching the class by leading discussion or practical exercises. Often, people can take their knowledge to the next level when they are asked to teach what they know.

4) Make the pre and post tests comparable

The easy way to make a pre and post test comparable is to make them identical. Some people object that this makes it easy to only focus on the answers to the pre-test and ignore the other material in the course. You can mitigate this by not letting learners keep their pre-test for reference and not going over the correct answers. Additionally, if the test focuses on the key learning objectives, then people’s hyper-focus on the pre-test topics is not necessarily a problem. 

However, if you don’t wish to have an identical pre and post test, they should be very similar. Perhaps you focus on different aspects of the same basic piece of information for each question. Additionally, in order to ensure that the difficulty level of the two tests is identical, you should rotate the order of the tests. Give half of the learners version A at the beginning and version B at the end. Give the other half of the learners version B at the beginning and version A at the end. If the tests are comparable and your sample is large enough, pre-test and post test average scores should be about the same regardless of the order of the versions. If version A or B is much easier than the other, it will become obvious in the averages over time.

5) Ask about attitude

Remember that knowledge is not the only thing that counts. Many times, less tangible attributes like confidence, values, and attitude have a larger influence on a person’s results. Someone could “learn” something, but disagree with it. Save a few questions to test for these critical attributes and see if your course moves the needle on something other than knowledge. 

For example: “on a scale of 1-10 (with ten being “Extremely Confident”) how confident are you that you can manage your money well?”

Ask questions about attitude in a way that tries not to lead people to your preferred answer. Use neutral language and ask learners for their opinion on issues.

For example: “Please provide your opinion on the statement, ‘Kids should make most of their own decisions without parental direction.’ Do you strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree?”

You can determine someone’s values by using a scenario-based question that forces prioritization among multiple good things.

For example: “Imagine that you discover your spouse has committed a non-violent crime. In your opinion, which of the following values is most important? Loyalty – help protect your spouse from retribution; Integrity – encourage your spouse to turn him or herself in; Mercy – overlook the incident and don’t bring it up.”

All of these five approaches are good ways to ensure your classes translate instruction into meaningful improvements in people’s lives.