What motivated you to write this book?
I've worried about my own smile sheets (aka response forms, reaction forms, level 1's) for years! I know they're not completely worthless because I got useful feedback when I was a mediocre leadership trainer-feedback that helped me get better. But I've also seen the research (two meta-analyses covering over 150 scientific studies) showing that smile sheets are NOT correlated with learning results-that is, smile sheets don't tell us anything about learning! I also saw clients-chief learning officers and other learning executives-completely paralyzed by their organizations' smile-sheet results. They knew their training was largely ineffective, but they couldn't get any impetus for change because the smile-sheet results seemed fine.
So I asked myself, should we throw out our smile sheets or is it possible to improve them? I concluded that organizations would use smile sheets anyway, so we had to try to improve them. I wrote the book after figuring out how smile sheets could be improved.
In the midst of designing a facilitator-led curriculum for a client, we were met with a conundrum: according to our SME(s), one particular class just had to have a quiz at the end. There were many problems with this idea, including the fact that none of the other 6 courses in the curriculum ended with a quiz and that the audience was new-hires - so how intimidating would a quiz be?
We finally compromised on a Knowledge Check - that way our SME felt fulfilled (and we fulfilled compliance requirements) but the learners wouldn't be too intimidated (we hoped).
What's the difference? you ask
