Evidence in Assessing Competence in the Workplace

One of the questions I am regularly asked is ‘how do I evidence the practical element of my assessor course?’ It is an area in which many people ‘overthink’ and therefore end up tying themselves in knots, uploading irrelevant and unlabelled information which quite frankly is more trouble than its worth!

In this blog, we will address each section of the course in respect of workplace evidence, with suggestions and ideas on what can be used as sufficient and reliable evidence. Evidence can differ dramatically depending on your industry, how you are operating or who your awarding body is, for example, if you are doing this course in a private training academy your evidence may differ from that that you could provide if you worked in a local authority college.

Within this course, Unit 2 is your workplace assessment element, this therefore is ‘what it says on the tin’ assessments that are done in a workplace or workplace environment. Your methods for this section are work environment observation, examining products of work, questioning the learner, discussions with the learner, witness testimony or learner statements. The first 3 of these are mandatory and must be done, the last three are optional.

*Remember: you need two learners per unit and each of these learners must do two assessments*
….we are then merely just following their assessment journey!

So, as promised, let’s break down those sections and look at our evidence requirements!

General Documents: 

This is for documents that are not related to your actual learner assessment but to you as an assessor and the course you are assessing:

Copy answers for questions 5, 6 & 8 from unit 1 - literally that! 

Standardisation activity: This is proof that you attend standardisation activities. The easiest way to do this is to upload an agenda or minutes from a standardisation meeting you have attended. If for some reason you have not attended a recent meeting you can have a professional discussion with your ELN tutor and we can discuss the procedures you are involved in for standardisation, ie shadowing a qualified assessor.

The criteria/curriculum/standards for your assessments: This is likely to be an awarding body assessor/course handbook

Planning:

This is your assessment planning evidence.

Assessment plans:

This is your assessment plan detailing the assessments, who they are with and when they are taking place. They should include the outcomes to be achieved, criteria required to be met and the assessment methods being used. We do have a template for this should you require however we encourage you to use your own companies/colleges documents where possible.

Written details for any methods of assessment not evidenced within your assessment: As mentioned earlier, some of the methods of assessment are not mandatory therefore you will need to evidence your knowledge of these methods by writing a statement about what is and why it is used as an assessment method.

Copy question 3b from unit 1 to evidence your understanding of holistic assessment.

Assessment:

This is where you put your assessing evidence, these are documents that confirm that your assessments took place and must relate to your planning. For practical evidence check out my new blog 

You need to ensure that all methods that you have said you are using are evidenced. Examples of assessment evidence are:

• Observation checklists (for observations, skills tests)
• Marking sheets (for questions/exams)
• Learner work (projects/assignments)
• Photographs (for product of work)
• Workbooks (for questions/assignments/projects)
• Screenshots (for e portfolio’s)
• Short videos (for skills test/oral questions)

As previously mentioned the evidence will very much depend on the methods used and how you record it for your awarding body, however, please bear in mind one piece of evidence is generally sufficient for each assessment and we do not require a video of an hours observation! A checklist will suffice!
Feedback & Evaluation:

In order for us to do an observation of your performance, we ask you to video yourself giving feedback to one of your learners. This video should be around 5-6 minutes long and have both you and your learner on camera. Check out the blog types of feedback for assessors.

As well as this we require:

Written feedback for all assessments (if this is on your marking sheets or observation reports etc it can be cross-referenced)
Your CPD log
Learner reflection journal (this is your reflection regarding your learning journey)

I always tell my learners to use reflection throughout the practical units. You are training to be an assessor, or maybe even working as an assessor, so think, ‘If I was assessing this evidence, would I be happy that it meets the criteria’ if you are not, the likelihood is, that neither will we be!

There will always be grey areas that may be difficult to evidence, especially in these trying times that we are going through, but if you have any uncertainty do not dwell on it give us a shout and we can discuss it and go through the options together and hopefully find something that will work.

Lastly, going back to the quote at the top of this blog, it would be wrong of us to believe anything on insufficient evidence, therefore your job is to prove your assessments took place and were VASCR, and you do this with the documents you upload and how you present them…..so make them clear, effective and well labelled …. and it will be plain sailing for us all!

Cordelia Castle,

Tutor, The eLearning Network.