How to Measure Learning with Pre/Post Testing in WordPress

Most course creators in WordPress can’t answer this basic question: How much did your students actually learn?

That doesn’t mean how many people completed the course, nor how it was rated, nor even whether or not they liked it. How much knowledge did they gain as a direct result of going through and completing the course?

The Measurement Problem

Most online courses are designed to measure activity, like completion rates, quiz pass rates, satisfaction, and time spent in a course. It’s pretty easy to tell who showed up and what they did, even how they scored on a quiz, but none of that tells you if anyone learned anything. A 2019 article in the Harvard Business Review reported that organizations spent $359 billion on training, but only 25% of people believed that the training measurably improved performance.

Even worse is that people forget the majority of information within days of learning it. That means a student could pass a quiz right after a course but retain very little of the material (and apply even less than that to their job) a week later. The passing score in a course doesn’t tell you whether knowledge will be retained, nor even how much a student knew coming in to a course vs. how much they left with. If you test before and after instruction, you can measure what students knew before starting a course vs. what they know at the end. That difference is the learning gain, and it’s a very useful metric for understanding whether your course is doing its job.

How Pre/Post Testing Works

The concept is simple. Students take a quiz before starting a course (the pre-test) and a similar assessment after completing it (the post-test). To get useful data from this comparison:

• Both assessments should cover similar content at a similar difficulty level so you can make a fair comparison.
• You need per-student tracking, not just averages for a group.
• You want category-level breakdowns so you can see which topics improved the most and which ones need more attention.

When those pieces are in place, you can answer questions about knowledge transfer that completion rates just don’t address.

As an added bonus to implementing a pre/post test system like this, research shows that the act of taking a test improves long-term retention of the material that’s being tested. This is known as the “testing effect”. In a 2006 study, researchers found that students who took practice tests remembered a lot more information than students who spent the same amount of time studying the material again.

WordPress Solutions

Despite the benefits of pre/post testing, virtually no WordPress plugins offer related capabilities. LMS plugins offer a lot of quiz settings and question types, but reporting is typically limited and quizzes only track scores. That’s one of the reasons we built pre/post testing linking into PressPrimer Quiz. With the Educator add-on, you can designate any quiz as a post-test and link it to a pre-test quiz. The plugin handles the comparison automatically.

When a student completes a post-test, their results page includes a progress section that shows how their performance has changed compared to the pre-test. Students can see their growth instantly and reflect on their performance.

The individual comparison is helpful, but the Pre/Post Analysis report in PressPrimer Quiz takes it to another level. It offers 3 comparison modes:

1. Linked pairs. Compare connected pre-tests with post-tests. Get a score comparison chart, improvement distribution, category comparison, and individual student results.
2. Compare any quizzes. This option allows you to compare any two quizzes, even if they’re not formally linked.
3. Compare attempts. Many sites will set students up to take the same quiz, with different questions from a large pool, over and over again. Or maybe employees need to complete the same quiz on a monthly or annual basis to make sure there are no knowledge gaps. With this tool, you can answer questions like, “Did students perform better on the fifth attempt than the first attempt?” and “How did employees perform this year vs. in 2024?”

A Powerful Sales Tool

Beyond the instructional and performance benefits, being able to quantify learning gains from your courses is a great way to demonstrate the value of your courses. Pre/post testing gives you real evidence. If you sell courses, imagine being able to say (and prove!) that student performance improves by an average of 38% by taking your course. Or if you need to defend your internal training program from budget cuts, being able to prove performance gains and retention over time are invaluable tools.

Getting Started

PressPrimer Quiz is the only assessment platform for LearnDash with tools like pre/post testing analysis. To get started with PressPrimer Quiz, download the free version from WordPress.org, which gives you everything you need to create robust quizzes.

If you’ve been relying on completion rates to measure your courses, pre-post testing is the single biggest upgrade you can make to better understand what your students are actually learning.