Competency means more than just being able to do a task. It is meeting a set of criteria laid out by the unit including:
Mapping is simply matching the criteria of the unit to all the stuff in your assessments.
You may have several questions and a number of assessment tasks to map.
To ensure a good paper trail, it’s important to map each of the questions and/or checklist items in the assessment tasks in a separate column. Why? An assessment tool developer (you) must be able to show in a snapshot precisely how and where each part of the unit is addressed in all your tasks and activities. Not just to colleagues, managers and other assessors, but in many cases to auditors from the regulator (and in rare cases, a court of law).
Didn’t I already do this when I was planning? Yes, but in a vague, broad-brushed, initial planning kind of way.
One of the big pitfalls when developing anything is you build a certain emotional attachment to the product you create, which leads to bias. Mapping the final assessment tool enables you to check your product through a different lense than the one you looked through when planning.
This bias creates problems when mapping too. We tend to overestimate the quality of our assessment question or checklist item.
Many of us have found during mapping that we just haven’t quite addressed a criteria properly (or sometimes missed it altogether!)
Use this rule when mapping: “If in doubt, leave it out!”
If you don’t have valid questions that sufficiently cover the ALL of the unit requirements, you expose your training organisation to non-compliance. This can lead to heartache for your learners who may need to redo the parts not covered by the assessment tool you designed.
Pack in your pride and be honest with yourself. Don’t try to make the questions fit when they don’t.
Did you know? Best practice suggests mapping learning content, not just assessment tools. What fun!
Now all the serious stuff is out of the way, let’s get mapping.
For the new standards for training packages we have:
If you have an old training package standard unit (usually pre-2015) then list the:
Put the first task in the first column, second task in the second column, and so on, until all your assessment tasks are listed.
Map the first assessment task, one at a time starting with the first assessment task. Match up the assessment questions/checklist items to the criteria of the unit, working down the page criteria by criteria, recording your results down the first column.
Now do the same for the second assessment task, recording the mapping down the second column.
Continue as such until you have mapped all of the assessment tasks.
Sometimes instead of an actual number, we may write “ALL”.
The reason for this is (for example) if the criteria of the unit states, “use appropriate verbal and non-verbal skills to seek and convey information” and the assessment task is a role play, then the assessment method by its very nature is assessing the criteria we are trying to assess.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Good question.
It is important not to inhibit the creative process. Developing assessment tools is about prototyping. It’s not going to be perfect the first time and nobody expects that of you. It’s important to create freely with the learner and the job role in mind.
It is far easier to map well designed draft assessment tools back to the unit.
If we are not designing for our clients, who are we designing for?
Starting the process with mapping will result in a mechanical, over-assessed approach to recognising competency in your candidates, rather than a streamlined, effective, thoughtful, and human-centred assessment that reflects the real-world job requirements.
Mapping last puts your learner’s needs first.
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