Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form

This book, "Performance-Focused Smile Sheets," completely reimagines the smile sheet as an essential tool to drive performance improvement. Traditional smile sheets (i.e., learner response forms, student reaction forms) don't work! Decades of practice shows them to have negligible benefits. Scientific studies prove that traditional smile sheets are not correlated with learning results! Yet still we rely on smile sheets to make critical decisions about our learning interventions. In this book, Dr. Will Thalheimer carefully builds the case for a new methodology in smile-sheet design. Based on the learning research, "Performance-Focused Smile Sheets" shows how to write better questions, more focused on performance. The book also shows how to deploy smile sheets to our learners to get valid feedback--feedback that can be used to help us as trainers, instructional designers, teachers, professors, eLearning developers, and chief learning officers build virtuous cycles of continuous improvement.

Will Thalheimer, PhD, has worked in the learning-and-performance field for almost 30 years—as a trainer, instructional designer, simulation architect, project manager, business product line manager, speaker, writer, researcher, and consultant. Forming Work-Learning Research in 1998 to build bridges between research and practical wisdom, Will works to provide the workplace learning-and-performance field with research-based information, simultaneously helping clients create and deploy radically more effective learning interventions.Author's Home: Somerville, Massachusetts