Most learning starts with content. A diagnostic tool starts with a question: what do you actually know?
A diagnostic tool is designed to evaluate a person’s prior knowledge, skills, and misconceptions before instruction begins.
In online learning, this information can be used to direct learners towards specific materials. Instead of giving everyone the same experience, a diagnostic helps to personalise the experience to their individual development needs.
There's a deeper principle at work here too. The act of being tested isn't just a measurement, it's a learning event in itself. Attempting to retrieve knowledge, even imperfectly, strengthens memory and sharpens awareness of what you don't yet know. So a well-designed diagnostic doesn't just reveal gaps, it begins to close them.
John Hattie's Visible Learning research identifies feedback as one of the highest-impact factors in learning. Diagnostic tools give learners a precise picture of where they stand and a clear direction for what to do next. Hattie also found that metacognition — the ability to think about and monitor your own learning — is among the strongest predictors of learning success.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge.
Infrastructure Maintenance Service Managers at Network Rail are responsible for a complex, high-stakes skillset. They often come to the role from varied professional backgrounds which means the gaps in their knowledge vary just as widely.
The challenge isn't just what they don't know. It's that they don't always know what they don't know. We designed a diagnostic tool to solve exactly that problem.
Learners work through a series of multiple-choice questions mapped to the core IMSM skillset. When they're done, the results don't just show a score, they reveal a personalised picture of strengths and development areas across the full range of competencies. For each area flagged for development, the learner is presented with a curated set of resources and courses they can take to build that skill.
Tomorrow, our next #ManyWaysToLearn is Learning through scenarios.