SNickers Retrospective

"SNickers Retrospective Workshop Evaluation." James S. Long and Steven C. Fransen. Pullman: Washington Cooperative Extension Service, 1986. Available at no charge from James Long, Room 323F Hulbert Hall, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164-6230.

In Washington State, for an in-service education workshop, we recently developed and tested an evaluation instrument. It depended on the participants' retrospective self-assessment of progress toward each educational objective. This was the prototype for what we have come to call the "SNickers evaluation."

Here's how it worked:

• In print, we repeated the educational objectives and provided an achievement scale for each objective.
• Then, for each objective, we asked participants at the end of the workshop:

  To draw on each achievement scale -
  An S to show where they started at the beginning of the workshop, and
  An N to show where they are now.

  To write a workshop activity that helped them move from S to N.

  To list a learning activity that would help them move from N (if less than 100%) toward what, for them, would represent 100% achievement of that objective.

We discovered several things about the instrument:

• It provided quantitative perceptual data about change in competence.
• It identified activities that proved helpful in progressing toward each objective.
• It generated plausible suggestions for additional, higher level training.

We trusted the "change data" because:

• The average S-starting point-was higher than the change score (that made sense to us).
• The distribution of S's reflected the varying backgrounds of the participants in the subject matter.
• The range of N's paralleled the varying on-the-job assignments of the participants.
• Responses to the "what helped?" question were accurate and specific to each objective.
• Replies to the "what next?" question were also specific to each objective and, sequentially, would follow this training.
• Participants' responses and observers' reports were similar.

This enabled us to conclude that the "SNickers evaluation"-a retrospective self-assessment of change in competence-provided trustworthy data, helped explain the training's success, and offered useful suggestions for planning future training.