This week, Brett Christensen published an article on how he’s used a Performance-Focused Smile Sheet to support him in teaching one of ISPI’s flagship workshops.
What I found particularly striking is how Brett used the smile-sheet results to make sense of learning effectiveness. His goal was to help his learners be able to take what they’ve learned and use it back on the job.
One smile-sheet question he used pointed to results that suggested that learners felt they had gained awareness of concepts, but they might not be fully able to put what they learned into practice. This raised a red flag, so Brett examined results from another question on the amount of practice received in the workshop. The learners told him that practice was only a little more than 50% of the workshop, and Brett used this information to consider changes for adding more practice.
He also used a question to get a sense of whether the spacing effect was utilized to support long-term remembering–a key research-based learning approach. He got good news there–so that even in a one-day workshop–many learners felt repetitions were delivered after a delay of an hour or more. Good instructional design!
For a century or more, our learner-feedback questions have focused on satisfaction, course reputation, and other factors that are NOT directly related to learning effectiveness. Now we have a new methodology, first described in the award-winning book, Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form. We ought to use this to get feedback about what we can do better.
Brett offers a wonderful case study from his work teaching a course offered through ISPI (Developed by Dr. Roger Chevalier). We are no longer hogtied with evaluations that provide us with bogus information. We can look for ways to get better feedback, improve our learning interventions, and get better results.
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