Instructional Design Work Sample for Trainers, Instructional Designers and Subject-Matter ExpertsEvery piece of your design is defensible. This tells you whether they line up.
Forty-two exercises on the decision instructional design is actually made of. Five real design briefs each ask you to place five decisions on named continua: how many days of finding out the request warrants, where the objective should be pitched, what share of the time goes to practice, what the end check must ask for, and which evidence the sponsor's claim needs. Fifteen keyed exercises test the same judgements from the other side, and two written exercises ask for one measurable objective and the item that would show it was met. The score is a chance-corrected proximity index, and the report pairs every design lean with what it gets you and what it costs, then draws each brief's chain with the link you lost named.
The first instructional design assessment that scores the chain, not the links
The Instructional Design Work Sample is a forty-five-minute applied skill assessment for trainers, instructional designers and subject-matter experts who build training. It measures constructive alignment across the design chain: whether the objective, the practice activity, the assessment and the evaluation evidence for one brief are the same thing at the same level, scored as proximity to what each brief warrants.
The failure instructional designers actually make is not a bad objective, a bad quiz or a bad session. It is four defensible pieces that do not line up: an objective that says understand the policy, a quiz of recall questions, a session that is a lecture, and an evaluation that measures how much people enjoyed it. Every piece can be defended on its own. Together they cannot show that anything changed. Courses in the process model teach the five phases one at a time; no assessment we know of measures whether a designer's five decisions for the same brief hold together. This one does, and only that.
ADDIE is named here as what it is: a public process vocabulary, analysis through evaluation, owned by nobody. The measurement rests on published constructs cited by author in the methodology note: constructive alignment, the performance-condition-standard form of an objective, the revised taxonomy of educational objectives, the conditions of learning, the first principles of instruction, cognitive load theory, the testing effect, the four-level evaluation model and its critiques, the success case method, the multimedia principles and the transfer literature. Every exercise is original, and no authoring tool, platform or certification programme is named or used.
Twenty-five of the forty-two exercises are placements. Five briefs, each a real request as it arrives, a pharmacy counter with three incidents, an expense policy that changes next month, a support team whose sponsor wants a communication workshop, a fire-warden refresher, a probation-review cycle, and for each one five placements: days of finding out on a slider, the objective's level on a six-point ladder, the share of time on practice as a percentage, what the end check asks for on the same ladder, and which evidence the claim needs. Fifteen keyed exercises ask which objective matches a job task, which activity has learners doing the task, which check sits at the objective's level, which evidence tests a claim, and what to do first with a request that names a solution. Two written exercises ask you to write one measurable objective for a stated performance problem, and the assessment item that would show it was met; they are graded against a rubric and reported apart.
The scoring is chance-corrected proximity, done the way the measurement literature says it has to be done. Your twenty-five placements are standardised to your own mean and spread, so that your anchoring and your response style, both of which vary by group and neither of which is the construct, drop out before anything is compared. The distance to the warranted shape is then read against the distance an ordinary respondent would show, where ordinary means somebody drawing each answer from the way designers typically answer that item, declared per item and printed on the report. Zero on the scale means indistinguishable from somebody who knows nothing but answers the way designers typically answer. A reader who presses the same value throughout is refused a figure, in plain words, rather than scored.
The report is a lean ledger. For each of the five continua it prints your lean, the direction your placements departed from the warranted ones across the briefs, with what that lean gets you in one column and what it costs when overused in the other: thorough analysis, shadowed by the design arriving after the problem has moved; concrete objectives, shadowed by an objective that describes the exercise and not the job. The pair for the direction you showed is printed heavy; the other direction is printed light and labelled as not shown, because a cost you did not incur is not a finding about you. Beneath it, each brief's chain is drawn as four linked placements, yours against the warranted ones, with the break named: which link stopped lining up with the one above it, and what that would have cost.
Around the ledger: the alignment index with its 68 and 95 per cent bands drawn on the scale and written in words, the five continua as contributors under it, the keyed strand reported beside it and never folded in, the written strand apart with a deferred exercise printed as deferred and never as a zero, one boxed if-then change drawn from your largest lean, the movement a re-sitting would have to clear to count as real change, the reliability table with every refusal printed, what zero means with the declared marginals, and the plain list of what the report does not say. At Rs 999 inclusive of GST in India, or US$9.99 elsewhere, that report is the product: certificate programmes in instructional design in India run at many multiples of it, and free ADDIE quizzes carry no work sample, no alignment scoring and no report.
What you walk away with
How close the shape of your twenty-five placements sits to the shape the five briefs warrant, after your own anchoring and spread are removed, chance-corrected so that zero is the designer who answers the way designers typically answer and 100 is the warranted shape exactly. The 68 per cent band is drawn as a shaded block, the 95 per cent band as an outlined box, and both are written in words beneath it.
Analysis before design, the objective's level, the share of practice, the level of the check, and the weight of the evidence: for each, the direction your placements departed from the warranted ones, the pair for that direction printed heavy, and the other direction printed light and labelled as not shown. A continuum with no evidenced lean says so at full size and claims neither shadow.
Objective, activity, assessment and evidence drawn as four linked ladders per brief, your placement as a dot and the warranted one as a square, and the link where your chain stopped lining up with the one above it named in words with what it would have cost, so you see which piece you lost rather than a total.
Fifteen exercises on recognising the aligned objective, activity, check and evidence, and on what to do first with a request that names a solution, chance-corrected against declared per-option marginals and reported on the same scale beside the index. Placement and recognition are different abilities, and the report does not average them.
One measurable objective for a stated performance problem, and the assessment item that would show it was met, graded against a printed rubric on the action, the condition, the standard and the match to the objective, never on grammar or style. An exercise nobody has graded yet is printed as deferred, never as a zero.
A single boxed if-then sentence naming a specific trigger and a specific replacement behaviour, drawn from your largest evidenced lean or from the commonest break in your chains. Beside it, the number of points a re-sitting after four to six weeks would have to move to count as real change rather than measurement error.
Inside your report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
A lean is your mean departure from the warranted placements across the five briefs, in your own standardised units. The pair for the direction your placements showed is printed heavy; the other direction is printed light and labelled as not shown. shown · not shown · no lean evidenced.
Your objectives describe the job, so everything downstream has something real to aim at.
A refresher for a fixed procedure gets an objective about judgement, and the session grows to fit the objective rather than the gap.
Your objectives are achievable in the time and can be checked before people leave.
The objective describes the exercise, not the job. People state the rule on Friday and skip it in the queue on Monday.
Your placements sat on both sides of the warranted ones. Both pairs are printed light; neither shadow is claimed as yours.
The gap you design for is the one that exists.
The design arrives after the problem has moved: a request in March gets a proposal in May.
Your designs arrive while the request is still warm.
You build the solution the sponsor named, and when the gap was not a knowledge gap the course runs and nothing changes.
| Continuum | Lean | Direction | Pair printed heavy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pitching the objective at the job's level | -0.71 | leans state the rule | Objectives that can be checked at the door |
| Reading the request before designing | +0.12 | no lean evidenced | neither |
How to read it: five rows on a full report, one per continuum. A shadow is printed only for the direction your placements showed, so the page cannot be read as generic praise or generic warning; the opposite direction stays on the page, light, so you can see what it would have cost.
About two chances in three that a re-sitting today would land between 50 and 66; nineteen in twenty between 42 and 74. Zero means indistinguishable from somebody who knows nothing but answers the way designers typically answer.
The break is between activity and assessment. Your assessment sat below the warranted placement (level 2, recognise the rule among others, against level 4, apply it in a realistic case) while your activity sat near it, so the two no longer describe the same thing at the same level. A check pitched below the objective cannot show the objective was met: it would pass people who can state the rule and skip it in the queue.
| Link | You | Warranted |
|---|---|---|
| Analysis gate | 2 days | 2 days |
| Objective | level 4, apply it in a realistic case | level 4, apply it in a realistic case |
| Activity | 60% practice | 70% practice |
| Assessment (break) | level 2, recognise the rule among others | level 4, apply it in a realistic case |
| Evidence | level 6, the job result against a comparison | level 6, the job result against a comparison |
How to read it: five chains on a full report, one per brief. The square is what the brief warrants and the dot is where you placed it; the break is the link where your chain stopped lining up with the one above it, named in words so you see which piece you lost rather than a total.
Built for
- Instructional designers and e-learning developers who want evidence that their objectives, activities, checks and evaluations line up, rather than a certificate that they know the five phases
- Corporate trainers and subject-matter experts asked to turn a request into a session, who want to know which link of their design chain they lose under a real brief
- L&D managers and training providers choosing or developing designers, who need one specific change per person with the evidence beside it
- Anybody preparing for an instructional design role who wants a work sample scored against the published literature rather than a recall quiz
Find out whether your design chain holds before a sponsor finds out for you
42 exercises across eight formats · about 45 minutes · five briefs, five continua, one alignment index with both bands, a lean ledger with every shadow printed, a chain per brief with the break named, and two written exercises graded apart. Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST, or US$9.99 elsewhere. Sit it again after four to six weeks of the boxed change.
₹999 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
It measures constructive alignment across the design chain: whether the objective, the practice activity, the assessment and the evaluation evidence you choose for one brief are the same thing at the same level. Knowing the five phases is not the construct. A designer can write a defensible objective, build a defensible quiz, run a defensible session and collect a defensible rating, and have four pieces that do not line up: understand the policy, a recall quiz, a lecture, and a satisfaction score. That is the failure this measures, through five real briefs and twenty-five placements, and the report draws each brief's chain with the break named.
By chance-corrected proximity. Your twenty-five placements are standardised to your own mean and spread, so your anchoring and your response style drop out, and the distance from the warranted shape is read against the distance an ordinary respondent would show, where ordinary means somebody drawing each answer from the way designers typically answer that item, declared per item and printed on the report. Zero means indistinguishable from somebody who knows nothing but answers the way designers typically answer; 100 is the warranted shape exactly; a negative figure is further off than ordinary. A reader who presses the same value throughout is refused a figure rather than scored.
The Lesson Design and Questioning Technique Assessment measures what happens in the room: questioning, checking understanding, responding to a wrong answer. The Training Evaluation and Programme Effectiveness Assessment measures the evaluation decision on its own: which level of evidence, what comparison, reading a figure honestly. The Workplace Trainer Credential Assessment certifies the trainer's five design decisions one at a time against a published cut. This has no pass mark and measures the chain between the decisions for the same brief, which none of the three does, and the report says so in its refusal block.
For each of the five continua the report prints your lean, the direction your placements departed from the warranted ones across the briefs, with what that lean gets you in one column and what it costs when overused in the other. Thorough analysis is shadowed by the design arriving after the problem has moved; concrete objectives are shadowed by an objective that describes the exercise and not the job. The pair for the direction you showed is printed heavy, and the other direction is printed light and labelled as not shown by your placements, so the page cannot be read as generic praise or generic warning. Where no lean is evidenced, the report says so at full size and claims neither shadow.
Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST, or US$9.99 elsewhere, one time; 26 credits on a business plan. Forty-two exercises across eight formats take about forty-five minutes. The report names a re-sitting after four to six weeks of the boxed change and prints the number of points the alignment index would have to move to count as real change rather than measurement error. No total is printed across the five continua, no percentile appears anywhere, and you are ranked against nobody. Certificate programmes in instructional design in India run at many multiples of this price, and free ADDIE quizzes carry no work sample, no alignment scoring and no report.
Each one takes a single capability, puts you inside the situations where it is actually tested, and scores your choices against published evidence — with a report designed for that capability alone, not a template. They span hiring, compliance, education, operations and personal skill.
Browse the catalogue →Methodology: Forty-two original exercises across eight formats: twenty-five placement exercises (fifteen six-point ratings and ten sliders) on five named continua across five design briefs; two first-move scenarios with graded options; four single-choice exercises; three select-every-line exercises; three match-the-following exercises; three true-or-false claims; and two written exercises graded by rubric and reported apart. DECLARED RESPONSE INSTRUCTION: one instruction for the whole instrument, what does this brief warrant, judged against the published design literature; a knowledge-style instruction about the design, not a behavioural tendency, mixed with nothing. CONSTRUCT STATEMENT: This measures constructive alignment across the instructional design chain: whether the analysis, the objective, the practice activity, the assessment item and the evaluation evidence a designer chooses for one brief are the same thing at the same level, so that each link can show the one before it was met. It is measured as the proximity of your placements on five named continua, across five design briefs, to the placements those briefs warrant, after your own anchoring and spread are removed. It does not measure skill with any authoring tool, graphic or visual design, writing style, platform or learning system administration, or project management. It does not measure facilitation in the room, which is the Lesson Design and Questioning Technique Assessment in this catalogue, nor the evaluation decision taken on its own, which is the Training Evaluation and Programme Effectiveness Assessment, nor the trainer credential, which is the Workplace Trainer Credential Assessment. It measures the chain, not any one link of it: a designer can write a defensible objective, build a defensible quiz, run a defensible session and collect a defensible rating, and this instrument is the one that says whether those four pieces line up. FRAMEWORK: ADDIE is named as a public, unowned process vocabulary; the measured construct is constructive alignment. SCORING DESIGN, C2, chance-corrected proximity scoring, ipsatised: every press is mapped to its own scale, the reader's answered placement vector is standardised to their own mean and spread and the warranted vector identically, the distance is the sum of absolute standardised differences, and the score is 100 (E[D_null] - D') / E[D_null], where E[D_null] is the seeded Monte-Carlo expectation of that distance for a respondent drawing each press from the item's DECLARED marginal and ipsatised the same way. Zero is a designer who knows nothing but places things the way designers typically do; the marginals are authored assumptions printed on the report and replaced by observed shares once live data exists. A reader with no spread in their raw presses is refused a figure and flagged, never scored. Fifteen keyed exercises are chance-corrected against declared per-option marginals; each competency carries a number only with at least eight answered items and omega at or above .70 unrounded. The written strand is reported apart as criteria met or DEFERRED. REPORT DESIGN, D5, the Strength/Shadow Pair as the organising object: each continuum's evidenced lean is printed with what it gets you and what it costs when overused, and the opposite direction's pair is printed light and labelled as not shown; beneath it an alignment-chain panel per brief, objective to activity to assessment to evidence, your placements against the warranted ones, with the break named. SOURCES: Biggs, Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment (Higher Education, 1996) and Biggs and Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Open University Press, 4th ed., 2011), for the construct; Mager, Preparing Instructional Objectives (CEP Press, 3rd ed., 1997), for the performance, condition and criterion form of an objective, and Mager and Pipe, Analyzing Performance Problems (CEP Press, 3rd ed., 1997), for the skill-deficiency versus performance-problem analysis keyed on the first-move scenarios; Anderson and Krathwohl (eds.), A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: a revision of Bloom's taxonomy (Longman, 2001), for the level ladder on the objective and assessment continua; Gagne, The Conditions of Learning (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 4th ed., 1985), and Gagne, Briggs and Wager, Principles of Instructional Design (1992), for the events of instruction and the match of practice to outcome type; Merrill, First principles of instruction (Educational Technology Research and Development, 2002), for the demonstration-application pairing keyed on the activity continuum; Sweller, Cognitive load during problem solving (Cognitive Science, 1988) and Sweller, van Merrienboer and Paas, Cognitive architecture and instructional design (Educational Psychology Review, 1998), for the worked-example effect scored on the activity exercises; Roediger and Karpicke, Test-enhanced learning (Psychological Science, 2006), for the testing effect keyed on the true-or-false claim and the practice share; Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks (Psychological Bulletin, 2006), for spacing on the matching exercise; Kirkpatrick, Evaluating Training Programs (Berrett-Koehler, 1994), and Alliger and Janak, Kirkpatrick's levels of training criteria: thirty years later (Personnel Psychology, 1989), with Alliger, Tannenbaum, Bennett, Traver and Shotland, A meta-analysis of the relations among training criteria (Personnel Psychology, 1997), for the evidence ladder and the weak reaction-outcome relation keyed on the evidence exercises; Brinkerhoff, The Success Case Method (Berrett-Koehler, 2003), for evaluation proportionate to the claim; Mayer, Multimedia Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2009), for the presentation principles the activity continuum stops short of; Baldwin and Ford, Transfer of training: a review and directions for future research (Personnel Psychology, 1988), and Blume, Ford, Baldwin and Huang, Transfer of training: a meta-analytic review (Journal of Management, 2010), for the work-environment explanation keyed on the objective true-or-false claim; Hattie and Timperley, The power of feedback (Review of Educational Research, 2007), for the feed-up, feed-back and feed-forward structure of the report; Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006), for the if-then form of the one change; Cronbach and Gleser, Assessing similarity between profiles (Psychological Bulletin, 1953), for the elevation, scatter and shape decomposition behind the ipsatised distance; Baumgartner and Steenkamp, Response styles in marketing research (Journal of Marketing Research, 2001), for the response-style contamination the ipsatisation removes; Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez, A review of multiple-choice item-writing guidelines (Applied Measurement in Education, 2002), for cue control. All forty-two items are original works written for this instrument; no item from any published questionnaire, certification programme or commercial instructional-design course is reproduced or adapted, no branded instrument, authoring tool, learning platform or vendor product is named or used, no competitor is named anywhere, and the instrument is not affiliated with or endorsed by any author, publisher, professional body or certification scheme named above.