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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your learning objectives include:
And your desired outcomes are to:
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.
If your learning objectives include:
And your desired outcomes are to:
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.