Are apprentice learners driven to complete learning support assessments?
This is a sponsored post from Aptem, proud headline sponsors of the Apprenticeship Guide Awards 2025.
Cognitive assessments evaluate individuals’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and behavioural tendencies. Many people will recall taking tests at school and most likely remember completing tests for subjects they were not particularly passionate about. Did you prepare for these tests? Did you give it your all?
Tests are prevalent in clinical, occupational, recruitment, and educational settings. Whether assessing learners on health and safety policies, technical knowledge relevant to their apprenticeship, or evaluating their fit for a particular job role, the test’s accuracy hinges on well-designed assessments and the motivation of the test-taker.
The significance of test-taker engagement
When participants aren’t inclined to put forth their best effort, the assessment outcome fails to reflect their true knowledge, skills, or abilities, rendering it invalid. This is crucial in learning support assessments, where mislabelling a learner’s capabilities or potential should be avoided. For instance, assessing cognitive abilities in young children is particularly tricky; they must be fully engaged and supported throughout the tasks.
Learners asked to complete assessments should understand the evaluation’s purpose and its benefits. In recruitment, individuals are motivated by the prospect of a job, often enduring lengthy assessments to reach their goal.
Conversely, the advantages of undertaking cognitive assessments for learning support should be clearly communicated. Many people feel anxious about assessments unless they are sure of success. Concerns often arise about how others perceive results, impacting self-esteem and identity. These processes may also remind them of past negative experiences in their education. Research indicates that high test anxiety leads to underperformance, misrepresenting the individual’s true abilities.
These issues can be mitigated with effective test design and administration. Essential aspects of good assessment design include:
· Matching assessment content to the apprenticeship level to prevent easy guesswork.
· Balancing difficulty so the test isn’t too easy or too challenging, maintaining motivation for effort.
· Including enough questions for reliability but avoiding fatigue and dropout due to length.
· Designing visuals for clarity, ensuring questions are easily navigable using a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen, and minimising distractions via full-screen overlays.
Robust test administration aims to alleviate anxiety and boost motivation by:
· Clearly conveying the assessment’s purpose and data usage.
· Offering clear instructions that can be revisited before the assessment begins.
· Advising the learner to complete the assessment without interruptions.
· Providing opportunities for post-assessment discussion of results.
Even with meticulously designed assessments, some individuals may not take the process seriously, opting to select answers randomly, prioritising speed over accuracy.
How Aptem Assess is designed
We designed Aptem Assess to provide a rapid measure of key cognitive abilities that underpin learning and achievement. In a short amount of time, it can highlight learners who may have an underlying specific learning difficulty. It shows which learners require a further exploration of their learning support needs. 
Aptem Assess is designed to be adaptive, so that learners do not have to spend excess time resulting in frustration. The visual design is created with some gamification elements which is more motivating for test-takers. In addition, Aptem Assess generates a ‘Quality Score’ which highlights where careless responding has occurred, and the result cannot be relied upon.
Learn more about Aptem Assess
For an estimated 87% of learners, the Aptem Assess cognitive assessment will take no more than 15 minutes. You can learn more about Aptem Assess here. If you would like to integrate Aptem’s cognitive assessment into your delivery, book a demo, or if you are an Aptem customer, please speak to your Customer Success Manager.
