Page 12: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2020)

Training Tips for Ships © cartoonresource/AdobeStock

Tip #16

Using Student Exam Results to Measure OUR Performance – Part II n last month’s Training Tips for Ships, we it may be time to consider adopting an LMS or some other began the discussion of how we can look simple online exam delivery tool that allows you to download at our existing training data to measure our the responses.

success as trainers and training organiza- In the previous article we looked at two simple, but remark-

I tions. The data in question are the results ably useful ways to slice and dice the data to reveal hidden from the multiple-choice exams we deliver indicators of learning, performance and even safety. The ? rst to our trainees. We deliver these exams all was to report on the performance of questions grouped by the the time, and we gather a tremendous amount of data (an- competency they cover. The second was to use the data to swers) over the years. Yet typically we only use that data to identify common misconceptions and misunderstandings held determine whether our trainees have gathered the knowledge by our employees. In this edition of Training Tips for Ships we we are trying to impart. There is so much more we can do. It is will add some additional ways of looking at our data to help time to look at this data from a different perspective: to evalu- determine the health of our training program.

ate OUR performance. One of the simplest approaches to looking at multiple-choice

In practical terms, these analyses will be dif? cult if you de- exam responses is to determine, on average, how well each liver paper-based exams, but easy to do if you deliver exams question is being answered. This is easy to do and the value online and can download the responses into a spreadsheet. It is immediately apparent as it allows us to identify those ques- is even easier if your LMS automatically supports the genera- tions which are being performed poorly across the organiza- tion of these metrics. Thus if you deliver paper-based exams tion. Once we have this data then the next step is to determine 12 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • September 2020

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