Lesson 4: Developing an Instructional Strategy
3. Gagné's Nine Events of Instruction
3.8. Assessing the Performance
Accessing student performance is necessary to definitively evaluate the effectiveness of your instruction. You need to find out if they learned what you intended them to learn. You must align performance assessment with your instruction's learning objectives.
For a webinar, giving a comprehensive assessment (test) is difficult. Your participants would typically not be obligated to complete it and most likely would not do it. However, you could give a short assessment at the end of the webinar on the key concepts addressed in your presentation. One way to do this is to use the assessment as a review or summary of your presentation. Not only will this help you determine if your instruction was effective, but it will also give your participants more opportunities to practice.
Methods for assessing the performance include:
- Summarizing your presentation by asking a series of questions aligned with your learning objectives instead of giving a bulleted text summary.
- Conducting a survey asking students to rate their knowledge after completing the webinar. The questions in the survey need to be directly aligned with your objectives. If short enough, you could do this at the end of your webinar. Otherwise, you can send a link to it in an email.
- Making an optional assessment available after the webinar to test their knowledge. Motivate them to complete it by offering something, such as a digital badge or certificate if they are successful.
