As an instructional designer, I know that Level 2 evaluation plays a significant role in ensuring that learners truly understand the presented material. While most e-Learning courses contain some type of test or quiz, many do not bother to provide adequate feedback. In fact, feedback, plays a crucial role in helping learners progress towards their goals and understand whether they have mastered the content from the course. The main goal of corrective feedback is to provide remediation and promote learning.
The feedback that learners receive can be either intrinsic or indirect or extrinsic or direct. The type of course, presentation methods, and assessment instruments chosen determine the type of feedback you provide. For example, while extrinsic feedback may be a good choice for multiple-choice questions, it may not work well for a game.
Instructional designers should carefully construct corrective feedback for each question to ensure that it covers all objectives of the learning activity and offers enough information for the learner to comfortably move forward with the course.
One of the ways to provide effective feedback to learners is to show the real world consequences. Instead of typical multiple-choice questions, instructional designers may consider creating scenarios that take learners to the appropriate next step depending on the answer they select. You may also find it useful to have a mentor pop in and out throughout the course to provide explanations, examples, and remediation to enhance the learning process.
If you decide to go with a “traditional” approach, your feedback should be composed of the following four parts:
Acknowledgment of learners’ response. For example: “That’s correct” or “Sorry, that’s incorrect.”
Statement of the correct response. For example: “The correct answer is ‘True.’” Note that this statement should only be included if the learner chose the incorrect response.
Repetition of the correct response. Instead of saying “The correct answer is B,” consider repeating the entire statement. For example: The correct answer is B. Instructional designers create prototypes during the development phase of the ADDIE model…”
Explanation of why the response is correct. For example: “…because prototypes are typically developed after conducting thorough needs analysis and writing learning objectives.”
To learn more about training evaluations and providing corrective feedback to learners, please read my Instructional Design for ELearning book.
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