Formative assessment is the process of using assessment procedures (like posing questions) during the learning process. The intention is to modify teaching and learning activities to improve a learner’s success.

Adaptive Learning is a personalized e-learning resource that uses formative assessment - asking learners questions (known as probes) to assess their understanding - to train at scale. Formative assessment is the best type of training delivery method for Sales because questions best assess a sales person’s actual skills, and whether they truly know the content or have mastery of the required skills. 

Here’s how formative assessment trains your sales team:

1. The Adaptive Learning software asks a sales rep a question about some aspect of sales - e.g., product knowledge, the sales process, or sales skills.
2. The sales rep answers the question, then self-assesses their confidence in their answer for the software.
3. The software uses the sales rep’s answer combined with their self-assessment plus other cues, like time to answer, to decide where the sales rep needs to go next in the learning content, how fast they should move through the content, and whether they need to see a learning resource or be asked another question.

What Makes Formative Assessment the Best Type of Training Delivery Method?

You’re able to gain a lot of knowledge about how a person learns by a simple answer to their question. A sales rep’s answer to a question can tell you: 

• What the rep does and (often more importantly) doesn’t know. Understanding what they don’t know about a topic can reveal instances of unconscious incompetence: the sales rep thought they knew something about a product or sales process but in reality did not. Or, the rep didn’t even understand the extent to which they were ignorant on a topic.
• If the rep needs to be reintroduced to certain content because they’ve forgotten it. Even your best sales rep can’t remember everything the first time they see it. The human brain needs multiple exposures to turn new learning content into long-term memory.
• If the rep is thinking critically about the content or has simply tried memorizing answers - a key indication that a comprehensive understanding of the material isn’t happening, making mastery of the learning content impossible.

Adaptive Learning does more than simply train sales staff, it has an impact on your business by making your sales team experts in your products and at their jobs.

To understand if Adaptive Learning is the right fit for your business, read this ebook which tells you how Adaptive Learning provides training at scale, addresses common misconceptions about Adaptive Learning, and more.