Course Project Overview

Types of Evaluation Designs

A number of different designs can be used to evaluate training programs.36 Table 6.8 compares each design on the basis of who is involved (trainees or comparison group), when measures are collected (pretraining, post-training), the costs, the time it takes to conduct the evaluation, and the strength of the design for ruling out alternative explanations for the results. As shown in Table 6.7, research designs vary based on whether they include pretraining and post-training measurement of outcomes and a comparison group. In general, designs that use pretraining and post-training measures of outcomes and include a comparison group reduce the risk that alternative factors (other than the training itself) are responsible for the results of the evaluation. This increases the trainer’s confidence in using the results to make decisions. Of course, the trade-off is that evaluations using these designs are more costly and take more time to conduct than do evaluations not using pretraining and post-training measures or comparison groups.

TABLE 6.7 Comparison of Evaluation Designs

Post-test Only

The post-test-only design refers to an evaluation design in which only post-training outcomes are collected. This design can be strengthened by adding a comparison group (which helps rule out alternative explanations for changes). The post-test-only design is appropriate when trainees (and the comparison group, if one is used) can be expected to have similar levels of knowledge, behavior, or results outcomes (e.g., same number of sales or equal awareness of how to close a sale) prior to training.