Assessing learners´ skills and competences

Final Assessment at the end of a course or training unit

In this module part, you will learn about why to implement a final assessment at the end of the FIL training course from participants’ and teachers’ point of view and two assessment tools commonly used for final assessment.

Final or summative assessment (assessment of learning) refers to the assessment of participants where the focus is on the outcome of a (whole) training program. This contrasts with formative assessment, which summarises the participants’ development at a particular time before or during the course.

Upon completion of a course, a final assessment as course review is an efficient tool for the successful collection of information addressing and gaining meaningful feedback on a large scale.

In this final questionnaire or survey or assignment, participants from the target group can evaluate their knowledge, skills and competences gained along with their new attitude and perspective towards their finances in everyday life as well as their overall performance during the course.

In case this is a questionnaire or survey, as described earlier on how to design assessment questionnaires for the training units, the final questionnaire should be suitable to training contents provided during the whole course and to the specific target group, use simple language and phrases. In some cases, it might be a good idea to re-use earlier questions but it is always better to, at least, address more questions.

Related to the consideration on how many questions should be included, it will in general depend on the training progress and any other assessment aspect you want to consider be covered (e.g. satisfaction with specific contents, formats, activities, impact etc.).

Participants’ satisfaction with the learning offer could be surveyed in order to be able to implement according to results an ongoing quality improvement process. This can also help in identifying the most and the least useful topic(s) or area(s) of the course which might in general not have good results and could, over some time, help in re-designing the training program.

Designing of such a questionnaire has to be well considered. It should be to the point and contain clear, effective questions addressing what one really needs to know. Typical considerations by teachers/ schools providing the training are:

• What should be included?
• What do we want to learn from the final survey?
• How can we use the survey results for improving our training – respectively contents and delivery?
• What knowledge and skills have been gained during the course?
• What is the impact on participants?
• Etc.

However, the final assessment should not be overwhelming for the FIL learners.