A Skills Practice experience is a form of simulated learning that allows people to learn from their actions and decisions with low-risk outcomes. Through trial and error in a safe, no-risk environment, employees learn from their failures, refine their problem-solving abilities, and develop critical and system thinking skills. Most importantly, the employees learn how they can contribute to the business in far less time.
In this article, we’re talking about scoring: what it is, why it matters, and how to leverage the power of scoring in your own learning programs.
What’s Scoring and Why Does It Matter?
Scoring is a process of assigning values to participants’ answer choices and actions. By leveraging scoring, learners, facilitators, and executives can get more out of data and analytics with intuitive reports and dashboards that bring actionable insights to life.
Benefits for Learners
Skills Practice scoring is core to driving the learn-by-doing experience. Through personalized learning, participants get real-time feedback that helps them tie behavior to outcomes and shows their strengths and opportunities for improvement.
Scoring creates an emotional connection to the learning experience so participants feel motivated to improve, while elevating their personal awareness of how they make decisions and the short- and long-term outcomes those decisions trigger.
In short, by linking scoring and feedback to relevant content, we reflect the daily complexities of real-life decision-making, expose cause-and-effect relationships, reveal both intended and unintended consequences, and compress the time between discovery, learning, and action.
Benefits for Learning & Development Leaders
Effective scoring of learning programs can also generate systemic results and downstream impacts that reinforce learning goals. These results are visualized into reports with easy-to-interpret insights on individual and aggregate participant performance. For learning leaders, this allows for more effective planning and future budgeting, as the data reveals where learners need additional training support and investment.
How To Use Scoring
Use scoring to engage and reward your learners, enhance realism and relevance, and measure learning progress. With SimGate™ Studio, our no-code authoring tool, you can create a contextually relevant, rich learning experience by mapping each sim answer option to positive and negative impacts across multiple performance criteria. This data dynamically updates in each round of the Skills Practice experience, generating customized feedback reports. Those reports directly reflect earned scores and provide personalized resource recommendations or inform next steps.
Identify Scoring Needs
With SimGate™ Studio, there are two types of scoring methods: aggregate scoring and impact scoring. Start with your learning goals, and you’ll quickly see which scoring method will work best for you.
Aggregate Scoring
If your learning goals include:
- Teaching and testing new skills
- Increasing knowledge and awareness
- Measuring right and wrong
Then aggregate scoring is for you!
This scoring method is simple and effective, typically used in knowledge-based e-learning to reflect choices made, create positive pressure, and stimulate competition.
Impact Scoring
If your learning goals include:
- Shifting mindsets and behaviors
- Analyzing and evaluating tradeoffs
- Revealing and gauging the impact of decisions
Then impact scoring is for you!
This scoring method allows for the measurement of decision impacts along with their relative effects, revealing real-world systemic complexities and interdependencies.
Let’s see it in action.
Aggregate Scoring Use Case
If your learning objectives include:
- Teaching the learner new client interactive skills
- Creating awareness about important selling concepts, frameworks, and organization support tools.
And your desired outcomes are to:
- Amplify and broaden skills sets for client interactions
- Test learners’ knowledge and ability to apply new learnings
- Measure right and wrong, displayed as an earned score compared to the total possible score
Then use aggregate scoring, where each answer choice has points or a discrete value associated with it. Scores are displayed as a sum total using simple calculations (addition, subtraction, average).
In aggregate scoring, results are added together for a total score.
Impact Scoring Use Case
If your learning objectives include:
- Shifting mindsets and behaviors into alignment with the leadership framework
- Analyzing tradeoffs, evaluating short- and long-term impacts, and assessing competing priorities
- Practicing new ways to make difficult decisions and gauge the impacts of those decisions
And your desired outcomes are to:
- Help learners understand how to live, breathe and role-model the leadership framework
- Reflects daily complexities of learners’ real-life decision-making: limited resources, competing priorities, and balancing trade-offs.
- Grow awareness and competency through self-generated “ah-ha” moments
Then use impact scoring, where answer choices or actions have one or more positive or negative effects on variables across multiple performance criteria. The final score is based on how each variable drives a larger one and is dynamically displayed as the cumulative “impact” of every decision made along with its associated weighted values.
In impact scoring, scores are measured on positive or negative effects based on participant answers.
No matter which scoring option you choose, you have the flexibility to create a rich learning environment that provides customized feedback, personalized recommendations, competitive dynamics, and a fully adaptive learning experience.
