In 2016 I published a book on how to radically transform learner surveys into something useful. The book won an award from ISPI and helped thousands of companies update their smile sheets. Now, I’m updating the book with the knowledge I’ve gained in consulting with companies in the learning-evaluation efforts. The second edition will be titled: Performance-Focused Learner Surveys: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form (Second Edition).
In the first edition, I listed nine benefits of learner surveys, but I had only touched the surface. In the coming book, I will offer 20 benefits. Here’s the current list:
Supporting Learning Design Effectiveness
- Red-flagging training programs that are not sufficiently effective.
- Gathering ideas for ongoing updates and revisions of learning programs.
- Judging the strengths, weaknesses, and viability of program updates and pilots.
- Providing learning architects and trainers with feedback to aid their development.
- Judging the competence of learning architects and trainers.
- Judging the contributions to learning made by people outside of the learning team.
- Assessing the contributions of learning supports and organizational practices.
Supporting Learners in Learning and Application
- Helping learners reflect on and reinforce what they learned.
- Helping learners determine what (if anything) they plan to do with their learning.
- Nudging learners to greater learning and application efforts.
Nudging Action Through Stealth Messaging
- Guiding learning architects to create more effective learning by sharing survey questions before learning designs are finalized and sharing survey results after data is gathered.
- Guiding trainers to utilize more effective learning methods by sharing survey questions before learning designs are finalized and sharing survey results after data is gathered.
- Guiding organizational stakeholders to support learning efforts more effectively by sharing survey questions and survey results.
- Guiding organizational decision makers to better appreciate the complexity and depth of learning and development—helping the learning team to gain credibility and autonomy.
Supporting Relationships with Learners and Other Key Stakeholders
- Capturing learner satisfaction data to understand—and make decisions that relate to—the reputation of the learning intervention and/or the instructors.
- Upholding the spirit of common courtesy by giving learners a chance for feedback.
- Enabling learner frustrations to be vented—to limit damage from negative back-channel communications.
Maintaining Organizational Credibility
- Engaging in visibly credible efforts to assess learning effectiveness.
- Engaging in visibly credible efforts to utilize data to improve effectiveness.
- Reporting out data to demonstrate learning effectiveness.
If you want to learn when the new edition is available, sign up for my list. https://www.worklearning.com/sign-up/.
The second edition will include new and improved question wording, additional questions, additional chapters, etc.
Matt Richter and I, in our Truth-in-Learning Podcast, will be discussing learner surveys in our next episode. Matt doesn’t believe in smile sheets and I’m going to convince him of the amazing power of well-crafted learner surveys. This blog post is my first shot across the bow. To join us, subscribe to our podcast in your podcast app.
You must be logged in to post a comment.