Page 11: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (December 2022)

to make assumptions about how well

The Author they understand everything else they need to know. But in a ? nancial audit,

Goldberg there are very speci? c rules about how

Murray Goldberg is CEO of Marine Learning Systems. the audit is to be performed and how

Email: [email protected] the work leading up to the audit (the ac- counting) must be conducted, otherwise the audit can become useless.

The very same is true for training and testing if we want to maximize the up- take of knowledge and skills, and if we want our assessments to provide useful information.

Understanding the fact that exams are more like audit processes than compre- hensive evaluations is critical because it changes a great deal about how we ap- proach training and testing. For exam- ple, much like with a ? nancial audit, we need to be very conscious of how we se- lect the sample of items we actually test.

Getting that wrong means we are far more likely to miss critical gaps. Also like a ? nancial audit, it means that the goal of the test is not only the act of sampling itself, but perhaps more im- portantly the motivation it creates in the trainee to learn the full breadth of materials.

This creates very important implica- tions for how we communicate with our trainees and conduct our testing. It in- forms us of whether and how we should allow repeated attempts on tests. It tells us about the utility of test randomiza- tion. It guides us in terms of the need for and the mechanisms to achieve trainee motivation and how to use that motiva- tion to maximize knowledge and skills.

All of these implications will be dis- cussed in the next edition of Training

Tips for Ships. In the meantime, I’ll leave you by restating the core idea of this article: testing can not tell us wheth- er someone knows everything they need to know or fully possesses the skills needed for a role. Next we will look at how to use that fact to ensure our train- ing program comes as close as possible to those goals.

Until then, keep well and sail safely.

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