Assessments measure knowledge of learners…

Knowledge and skill assessments should be based on the learning objectives for the class. The questions should be distributed proportionally across the learning objectives based on the percentage of content for each objective. The learning objectives themselves are best aligned with business objectives to determine the importance and priority of focus. The business objectives will need to be identified and developed prior to creating learning objectives.
Knowledge and skill assessments are a good source to measure what knowledge the participants have when they leave the learning environment. However, unless you conduct a pre-assessment, it can be difficult to determine if they learned it from the training or enter the class with the knowledge. Participants may not communicate their knowledge effectively in a pre-assessment even if they know the content, especially if the questions still need to be tested for construct (can the knowledge be used effectively) and criteria-related (is the knowledge being used by top performers) validity.

Application evaluations become more difficult when you try to educate a group who might be familiar with the content. How do you know when behaviors stem from a class or learning event you devised? How do you know that your content didn’t trigger an approach participants learned at an earlier stage in their careers? At times, we may not know if someone’s past experience aided him/her in understanding material better. All this should be taken into consideration before a level of competency, application, and ROI are calculated and set.