When it comes to employee training, why do we skip ahead to the quiz?
Why do we feel like skipping ahead to the quiz when it comes to our employee training at work? Do we have to take the training? Is it a good use of our time? The training content must have been created to help us, yet, instead of reading the words, listening to audio, or watching the video, we just want to keep clicking “Next” to skip ahead, to get to the quiz.
With employee training we like to skip ahead, why?
We want to learn more in less time.
Popular software applications for learning and training have implemented features designed to prevent employees and learners from continuously clicking the “Next” button. They force you to interact with the content and spend a certain amount of time on the page. Does this work? Are employees paying attention, or just finding other distractions?
We want to skip ahead to the quiz because it’s where we prove what we know and discover what we don’t. Sometimes, by completing it quickly, it’s how we demonstrate that the training wasn’t the best use of our time. But the most important factor and the key component of the quiz (the question and answer interaction), might be where we actually start our learning process.
Training questions make us think and help us learn
What happens when we get presented with a question we don’t know? We go back to the training material, clicking the “Back” button until we find the answer, and sometimes we just ask Google. It’s after we answer the question where the employee training videos, interactive scenarios, and other content is most helpful.
The question is what makes us think. First thought, “do I know the answer?” For our brains, this might be why we skip ahead to the quiz. In fact, there’s a body of knowledge and research dating back to the 1960’s and 1970’s that analyzes the use of questions in teaching.
… the asking of questions is “one of the basic ways by which the teacher stimulates student thinking and learning.”
– Meredith Gall quoting Mary Jane McCue Aschner
Employee training needs more questions
Traditionally, employee training includes lots of content offered in various forms like articles, audio, interactive games, and video. All of it helps us learn, but with different preferences in learning styles, sometimes content can be distracting and include information we don’t need. However, information in question and answer format is both simple and specific. Good questions are often much less distracting.
If questions in quizzes and tests cause us to think and recall, then when we don’t know the answer, we get triggered to learn it. This is your learning moment. The process of finding the answer is the process of learning.
The difference between guessing and knowing answers to questions is often just a matter of how much information we’ve previously gathered. Answering wrong can be a result of either a lack of information, or possibly mis-information. Have you ever felt like you didn’t study enough for a test? Have you ever felt like you were sure you knew the correct answer, but ended up getting the question wrong?
We skip ahead to the quiz when we take our employee training courses because we want to finish quickly, learn what we need to know, and be able to move on fast.