What Do You Mean a Knowledge Check Doesn’t Have to be for Checking Knowledge?
It seems almost like a standard template that an e-learning spends most of its time providing information to the learner, and then closes out with a multiple choice knowledge check that can probably be completed having only half-paid attention to the module itself. At worst, a learner may have to go back into the module to look for a key word here or there. We’re used to the cadence of being provided with information and then having a knowledge check on that information at the end. After all, it‘s called a “knowledge check”, right? We put it at the end to check to see if anything was learned. But there are different ways to approach knowledge check questions to make learning more effective and engaging.
Before we can talk about different ways to use knowledge checks, we must ensure that the questions we’re writing are meaningful and purposeful. We’ve all heard the cliché of a multiple choice question like “Who was the fourth president of the United States?” and two of the choices are Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. We laugh at it, but how far off is that from the average multiple choice question? Well-written multiple choice questions that provide actual meaning aren’t easy to craft, but they’re the type where the learner really needs to know the answer.
I remember in high school I had a government teacher who was notorious for his multiple choice tests. Some students would start the class and find out up front that all the tests would be multiple choice, and grin to themselves thinking it’s going to be a walk in the park. Those students were ill-informed. In these tests, each answer choice would be multiple complex sentences, roughly the same length so none of them stood out, and most importantly – each option sounded completely plausible if you didn’t have more than a passing acquaintance with the content. You actually had to read the textbook, understand the content, and consider each option carefully.
Now, I’m not necessarily advocating for all your knowledge checks to be like that. It’s important to know your audience, your learning objectives, and the purpose of the course. If it’s for a certification, maybe so. But, even if it’s not, it’s important to consider: Is this knowledge check just to check a box or do we have a purpose for it?
Which gets us back to how we can use knowledge checks in ways they typically aren’t used. Sometimes, it’s okay for a knowledge check to not actually be checking for knowledge. Sometimes a knowledge check can be the vehicle for learning. One time, in an e-learning, I created a matching knowledge check game. The task was to sort a number of brands into different categories. The stakeholders and the SMEs told me “Hey we can’t have this knowledge check here. We haven’t provided the learners with that information yet.” But the purpose wasn’t to check for knowledge. The purpose was to provide the information. To do that, we have to be careful about our set up. For instance, framing the instructions as “Sort the brands in the categories you think they might belong to. If you get it incorrect, you’ll be told it’s the wrong category and be allowed to try again as many times as you need.” Or something along those lines to set the expectation that this is not pass/fail and that you’ll be allowed to try as many times as you need.
Introducing the content as a knowledge check serves a few different purposes. First, it activated the learners’ prior knowledge about the brands. Some learners may have no prior knowledge and may choose to do quick Google searches on them to sort them (finding the answers through research.) Others may try to brute force their way through by continually trying to sort the brands into the different categories until they placed them in the right ones. Try a category, receive feedback, try a different one until you find the correct one. This engages the learner and maybe even frustrates them a little bit. That’s okay. The repetition and frustration of trying until the correct one is found makes the learning stickier.
But perhaps it’s not as complicated as that. Perhaps it’s simply a single well-written multiple choice question (though maybe not as complicated as the government class example from earlier.) A question where we don’t expect the learner to know the answer because we haven’t given it to them yet. Whether they get the answer right or wrong isn’t the point. The point is – we’ve started to get them thinking about the topic at hand. For many learners, getting the answer wrong piques their interest as they strive to understand why they were wrong. In this manner, the knowledge check question can be a form of WIIFM.
Well-crafted questions of various forms can be placed throughout different parts of the e-learning and have different purposes. The examples I’ve listed here are just a couple of possibilities. So, the next time you’re looking for something to engage the learner, rather than having them read text, flip a card, or watch a video, consider a purposeful knowledge check that isn’t necessarily checking for knowledge.
