Assessments, Quizzes & Surveys

Assessment reporting in Acorn PLMS enables you to extract actionable insights from your quizzes, tests, and surveys. Whether you need to understand how learners performed on individual questions or track who has participated in your surveys, the reporting tools provide the data granularity your organisation requires.

Understanding Question Performance

Accessing question-level data allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your assessment items. Acorn PLMS captures detailed metrics for each question within your assessments and surveys, enabling you to identify which questions learners find most challenging and which perform well.

Question-level analytics help you:

• Identify difficult content: Recognise questions with consistently low pass rates or high error frequencies, signalling that underlying content may need clarification or additional support.
• Evaluate question quality: Assess whether individual questions are functioning as intended and contributing meaningfully to your assessment.
• Refine learning paths: Use performance data to adjust follow-up content, remediation activities, or learner groupings based on specific question responses.
• Validate instructional design: Confirm that your assessment items align with learning objectives and accurately measure competency.

Accessing Question-Level Reports

Within your assessment reporting dashboard, you can drill down to examine performance metrics specific to each question. This granular view ensures you understand not just overall assessment results, but the precise areas where learners succeed or struggle.

Survey Participation Tracking

Monitoring Survey Engagement

When you deploy surveys across your organisation, tracking participation is essential for data validity and engagement measurement. Acorn PLMS automatically records participation metrics, allowing you to monitor survey completion rates in real time.

Participation tracking capabilities include:

• Completion status: Identify which learners have completed your survey, which are in progress, and which have not yet started.
• Response rates: Calculate organisational and group-level participation percentages to assess overall engagement with your survey initiatives.
• Participation trends: Monitor how participation changes over time, helping you understand optimal timing and distribution channels for future surveys.
• Reminders and follow-up: Use participation data to target reminders to non-respondents, increasing completion rates and data quality.

Using Participation Data

Survey participation information supports your broader learning analytics strategy. By identifying patterns in who participates and when, you can improve survey design, distribution methods, and response rates for future initiatives.

Evaluation Data Exports

Exporting Assessment Data

Accorn PLMS allows you to export comprehensive evaluation data in formats compatible with your existing systems and workflows. These exports include question-level responses, summary statistics, and participation records.

Export Capabilities

When you export evaluation data, you can include:

• Individual learner responses: Export answers provided by each learner, including response text, multiple-choice selections, and timestamp information.
• Aggregate statistics: Generate summary data showing question difficulty, discrimination indices, and performance distributions across your learner population.
• Participation records: Export lists of survey respondents and non-respondents, useful for compliance reporting or follow-up communication.
• Custom report parameters: Filter and customise exports by date range, learner group, assessment type, or other relevant criteria.

Working with Exported Data

Exported evaluation data integrates seamlessly with external analytics tools, learning record stores (LRS), or your organisation's business intelligence platforms. This flexibility ensures you can perform advanced analysis, create custom visualisations, or meet regulatory reporting requirements.

Common export uses include:

• Compliance documentation: Archive assessment records for regulatory or accreditation purposes.
• Advanced analytics: Conduct statistical analysis, item response theory (IRT) modelling, or predictive analytics using your preferred tools.
• Integration with HR systems: Merge assessment data with employee records for talent development or skills tracking initiatives.
• Stakeholder reporting: Create custom reports for senior leadership, compliance teams, or external audit bodies.

Maximising Your Assessment Reporting

Best Practices

To get the most from Acorn PLMS assessment reporting:

1. Review question-level data regularly: Schedule periodic reviews of question performance to identify trends and make timely instructional adjustments.
2. Monitor survey participation actively: Set participation targets and proactively follow up with non-respondents to maximise data quality.
3. Establish export workflows: Define clear processes for exporting data at regular intervals, ensuring consistent record-keeping and analysis schedules.
4. Align reporting with objectives: Connect your reporting questions to your organisation's learning and development goals, ensuring data collection serves your strategy.
5. Share insights with stakeholders: Use exported data and question-level analytics to communicate assessment findings to instructors, learners, and leadership, driving continuous improvement.

Summary

Assessment reporting in Acorn PLMS—spanning question-level analytics, survey participation tracking, and robust data exports—provides your organisation with the visibility needed to optimise learning outcomes. By leveraging these capabilities, you transform raw assessment data into strategic insights that inform content design, learner support, and organisational decision-making.

Course Evaluations & Feedback Surveys Overview

Acorn PLMS provides native functionality for creating and managing course evaluations and feedback surveys. You can design customizable forms to gather learner input on courses, instructors, and overall learning experience. Whether you're conducting post-course satisfaction surveys or implementing Kirkpatrick-style multi-level feedback, Acorn captures responses in real time and provides comprehensive reporting capabilities to support continuous improvement and stakeholder communication.

Creating Customizable Feedback Forms

Building Your Survey

You can create feedback and survey forms as native activities within your courses and live learning events. Acorn's Feedback Form activity type allows you to design custom questions tailored to your evaluation needs. This flexibility enables you to gather specific insights about course content, delivery methods, instructor effectiveness, and learner satisfaction.

Feedback forms can be inserted into both On-Demand/Self-Paced learning and Live Learning events. For live learning scenarios, you can add surveys and feedback activities as post-event components, ensuring learners complete evaluations while the experience is fresh. This approach works alongside other assessment types such as quizzes, assignments, and knowledge checks.

Customization Options

Your organisation can configure feedback forms to match your evaluation strategy. You can design forms to capture:

• Instructor ratings – Assess teaching effectiveness, clarity, engagement, and responsiveness
• Course satisfaction – Evaluate content relevance, learning objectives achievement, and overall satisfaction
• Experience feedback – Gather insights on course structure, delivery platform usability, and support resources
• Kirkpatrick-style assessments – Implement multi-level feedback frameworks to measure reaction, learning, behaviour, and results

Each form can include multiple question types and custom rating scales aligned to your organisation's evaluation framework.

Managing Anonymity and Participant Tracking

Anonymous Response Collection

Acorn supports anonymity for survey responses when you need to encourage candid feedback. When creating a Feedback Form activity, you can enable an "Anonymous" toggle to collect responses without identifying the respondent. This feature helps protect respondent privacy while maintaining data integrity for analysis.

Even when responses are anonymous, you retain full access to review submissions and analyse aggregate results. This balance between privacy and insight allows your organisation to gather honest feedback without compromising reporting capabilities.

Tracking Participation

For assessment campaigns and course surveys, Acorn provides full participation tracking. You can access a comprehensive list of campaign recipients and their responses through the assessment campaign module. This capability enables you to:

• Monitor who has completed evaluations
• Identify non-responders for follow-up
• Track response rates across cohorts
• Correlate feedback with participant demographics or learning paths

Participation data is recorded against each respondent, giving you visibility into completion status while maintaining the option to anonymise actual responses if configured.

Capturing and Reporting Results

Real-Time Data Collection

Responses are captured in real time as learners complete feedback forms. This immediate data collection enables you to respond quickly to feedback, address concerns, and make timely adjustments to courses or instructor support.

Comprehensive Reporting

Acorn's Momentum module provides dedicated reporting functionalities for survey results. You can access dashboards that summarise feedback data at both individual and aggregate levels, supporting multiple use cases:

• Individual-level reporting – Review specific respondent feedback (where not anonymised) to identify targeted improvement opportunities
• Aggregate analysis – View consolidated results across all respondents to identify trends, patterns, and systemic insights
• Stakeholder reporting – Generate summary dashboards for leadership, instructors, and curriculum teams to inform decision-making

These reporting capabilities support continuous improvement cycles, helping your organisation track the impact of changes and demonstrate learning programme effectiveness.

Implementation Best Practices

Timing and Placement

Place feedback forms strategically within your learning events:

• Post-course evaluations – Add surveys at the end of on-demand courses to capture immediate impressions
• Post-event surveys – Insert feedback activities after live learning sessions while engagement is highest
• Multi-point feedback – Consider collecting feedback at multiple intervals for longer programmes to track evolving perceptions

Question Design

When designing your feedback forms:

• Align questions to your evaluation objectives (reaction, satisfaction, instructor effectiveness, etc.)
• Use consistent rating scales across related questions for easier analysis
• Keep forms concise to encourage completion and reduce respondent fatigue
• Include both quantitative ratings and qualitative comment opportunities for richer insights

Privacy Considerations

Decide on anonymity based on your feedback goals:

• Enable anonymity for sensitive topics or when you want to encourage candid responses
• Use identified responses when you need to follow up with specific learners or correlate feedback with their learning outcomes
• Communicate your privacy approach clearly to respondents to build trust

Leveraging Kirkpatrick-Style Assessment

Acorn's flexible feedback forms support Kirkpatrick's four-level evaluation model:

• Level 1 (Reaction) – Measure satisfaction with course content, delivery, and instructor using rating scales
• Level 2 (Learning) – Combine feedback forms with knowledge assessments (quizzes, assignments) to evaluate learning outcomes
• Level 3 (Behaviour) – Design post-course surveys to gather data on application and transfer of learning
• Level 4 (Results) – Use survey data alongside organisational metrics to evaluate business impact

By structuring your feedback forms around this framework, you can build a comprehensive evaluation strategy that demonstrates learning programme value to stakeholders.

Next Steps

Start by defining your evaluation objectives and the specific feedback you need to gather. Then design your feedback forms in Acorn, deciding on question types, rating scales, and anonymity settings. Configure forms as post-course activities in your learning events, review submissions through the Momentum reporting module, and use insights to refine your courses and instructor support continuously.

Grading & Score Tracking Overview

Acorn PLMS provides a robust grading and score tracking system that captures learner performance across multiple assessment types and organizational levels. Whether you're tracking individual quiz results, module-level achievement, or curricula-wide progress, Acorn automates much of the grading process while maintaining the flexibility for manual intervention when needed.

Score Tracking at Multiple Levels

Module-Level Scoring

Acorn tracks scores at the module level, capturing all assessment results embedded within individual courses. When learners complete quizzes, assignments, or evaluations within a module, their performance is automatically recorded and aggregated to reflect their overall module achievement.

Curricula-Level Scoring

Beyond individual modules, Acorn supports curricula-level score tracking, allowing you to monitor learner progress across entire learning programs. This enables your organization to evaluate performance at:

• Individual learner level
• Cohort level
• Partner level
• Program level

Your reporting and analytics tools provide visibility into learner performance across all these dimensions, helping you identify trends and make data-driven decisions about program effectiveness.

Automatic Grading

Acorn's default grading mechanism is fully automated. When learners complete assessments using supported question types, the system immediately calculates and records their scores. This automation eliminates manual data entry errors and ensures consistent, immediate feedback to learners.

Supported Question Types

Acorn's quiz builder includes a diverse range of automatically graded question types. These questions are scored instantaneously based on predefined correct answers and scoring rules you establish during quiz creation.

Manual Grading and Overrides

Manual Marking for Essay and Short-Form Responses

While most question types are automatically graded, Acorn provides the flexibility to manually mark essay and short-form responses. This ensures a comprehensive assessment solution that accommodates both objective and subjective evaluation methods.

Administrative Pass/Fail Override

Acorn supports manual Pass/Fail entry with administrative override capabilities, classified as a Priority 1 requirement. This functionality is particularly important for accreditation purposes and allows administrators to:

• Manually override automated grades when necessary
• Apply pass/fail designations based on criteria outside standard grading rules
• Ensure compatibility with prerequisites and instructor-led training (ILT) requirements

This capability gives your organization the flexibility to handle exceptional cases and maintain alignment with accreditation standards.

Weighted Scoring

Question-Level Weighting

Acorn PLMS supports the ability to weigh individual questions within an assessment. This standard feature allows you to assign different point values or weights to questions based on their importance or complexity.

Section-Level Weighting

Beyond individual questions, Acorn's quiz builder can apply different weights to module sections when calculating a final module score. This means you can emphasize certain content areas or skill domains over others, ensuring that your final module grades reflect your organizational priorities and learning objectives.

For example, you might weight a critical skills section at 40% and a foundational knowledge section at 60% to calculate an overall module score that prioritizes what matters most to your organization.

Pass/Fail Thresholds and Tracking

Acorn supports quiz pass/fail tracking as part of its comprehensive reporting suite. You can:

• Define pass/fail thresholds for individual quizzes
• Track quiz outcomes at both individual and aggregate levels
• Review results by learner, cohort, program, or any other reporting dimension
• Generate reports that clearly indicate which learners have passed or failed specific assessments

This tracking capability is essential for compliance, accreditation, and identifying learners who may need additional support or remediation.

Assignment Management with Grading

In addition to quizzes and evaluations, Acorn allows assignment activities to be added to courses with built-in options for grading and feedback. You can:

• Create assignments as course activities
• Grade submissions manually or according to rubrics
• Provide detailed feedback to learners
• Track assignment completion and performance

This integrated approach ensures that all assessment types—quizzes, evaluations, and assignments—feed into your overall performance tracking system.

Gradebook Functionality

Grade Storage and Reporting

Student grades are meticulously tracked within Acorn and can be easily reported and downloaded, ensuring efficient grade management and accessibility. Your gradebook provides:

• Complete grade history for each learner
• Aggregated views across modules, curricula, and programs
• Export capabilities for integration with other systems
• Accessibility for authorized administrators and instructors

Multi-Level Visibility

Acorn's reporting and analytics tools integrate grade data across all assessment types and organizational levels, providing comprehensive visibility into learner performance. This allows stakeholders at different levels of your organization to access relevant grade information.

Assessment Types

Acorn PLMS currently supports self and manager assessments, enabling structured evaluation of capabilities and development needs. Additional assessment types—including manager+1, peer, 360 reviews, observational checklists, and auto-scoring—are planned for release in late 2026.

Best Practices

When implementing grading and score tracking in Acorn:

• Define clear pass/fail thresholds aligned with your organizational standards and compliance requirements
• Use weighted scoring to emphasize content areas that matter most to your learning objectives
• Leverage automatic grading for efficiency while reserving manual marking for subjective assessment types
• Regularly review grade reports to identify trends and learner support needs
• Utilize administrative overrides judiciously and document when manual interventions occur
• Export and archive grade data for accreditation and compliance documentation

Quiz & Test Creation Overview

Acorn PLMS includes a robust quiz and assessment engine that allows you to create, manage, and deploy tests within your courses. Whether you're building simple knowledge checks or complex adaptive assessments, the platform captures learner performance data automatically and makes it available through comprehensive reporting.

Creating Quizzes and Tests

Acorn supports embedded assessments and quizzes integrated directly into your course content. When you create a quiz, you can configure multiple settings to align with your learning objectives and organizational requirements.

To begin, access the quiz creation interface from your course authoring area. You can create individual quizzes or organize multiple quizzes into banks for efficient management and reuse across courses.

Built-in Question Types

Acorn provides standard question formats to support various assessment needs. While the platform's question type library is designed to accommodate common educational scenarios, you should consult your organization's assessment strategy to determine which question types best serve your learners' needs.

Each question type supports standard configurations including answer options, correct answer designation, and feedback messaging. You can combine different question types within a single quiz to create varied assessment experiences.

Quiz Banks and Organization

Organize your assessment content efficiently by creating quiz banks—centralized repositories of questions that you can reuse across multiple courses and assessments. This approach reduces duplication, maintains consistency in question quality, and simplifies updates across your learning program.

Quiz banks allow your organization to build a scalable library of validated assessment content. When you need to update a question or add new assessments to existing courses, you can leverage your existing bank rather than creating questions from scratch each time.

Randomization

Randomization features enable you to vary the presentation of quizzes across learner attempts or cohorts. You can randomize the order in which questions appear, preventing learners from memorizing question sequences and encouraging genuine understanding of the material.

This capability is particularly valuable when you administer the same assessment to multiple groups or allow learners multiple attempts. Randomization helps ensure fair assessment practices and reduces the likelihood of learners sharing answers based on question position.

Weighted Scoring

Customize how your quiz contributes to overall course performance using weighted scoring. You can assign different point values to individual questions or question groups, reflecting the relative importance of different content areas or learning outcomes.

Weighted scoring allows you to emphasize critical concepts or competencies. For example, you might assign higher weight to questions assessing core procedural knowledge while assigning lower weight to questions on supplementary material. This approach ensures your assessment results accurately reflect learner mastery of your priority learning objectives.

Branching Logic

Branching logic enables adaptive assessment pathways based on learner responses. Configure your quiz so that subsequent questions or content branches depend on how learners answered previous items. This capability creates personalized assessment experiences that respond to individual learner performance.

Branching logic is valuable for:

• Adaptive difficulty: Direct learners toward more challenging content if they demonstrate mastery, or provide additional practice if they struggle with foundational concepts.
• Targeted assessment: Ask follow-up questions only to learners whose previous responses indicate a need for deeper exploration.
• Efficient assessment: Shorten overall quiz length by allowing learners to skip sections they've already demonstrated competency in.

Tracking and Data Capture

Acorn automatically captures granular assessment data with no manual entry required. The platform tracks:

• Individual attempt records
• Quiz scores and performance metrics
• Time spent on each quiz
• Learner responses to individual questions
• Completion status and timestamps

This data is automatically available for analysis and reporting, allowing you to understand learner performance at both individual and aggregate levels.

Assessment Reporting

Access quiz and feedback reports to monitor scores and performance across your learner population. These reports complement your progress and completion tracking, providing a complete picture of assessment outcomes.

Use assessment reports to:

• Identify learners who may need additional support
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your training content
• Measure performance against learning objectives
• Generate compliance and certification documentation
• Support decisions about course revisions or interventions

Accessibility Considerations

Acorn is WCAG 2.0 compliant. While quiz questions are not automatically read aloud by the system, you can enhance accessibility by embedding audio files, videos, or other multimedia resources directly within quiz content. This allows you to support learners with different accessibility needs while maintaining assessment integrity.

Integration with Certification and Accreditation

Combine quizzes with other Acorn features to create complete accreditation workflows. Your organization can use quizzes alongside Customizable Certificates, Feedback Forms, and Email Workflows to automate the entire certification process—from course completion through assessment to certificate generation and delivery.

This integrated approach is particularly valuable for professional development, compliance training, and credential programs where you need to verify completion, assess competency, gather feedback, and issue credentials automatically.

Best Practices

When designing your quizzes and tests:

• Align with learning objectives: Ensure each question assesses specific, stated learning outcomes.
• Use varied question types: Combine different question formats to accommodate diverse learner preferences and assess different cognitive levels.
• Test your configurations: Verify that randomization, branching, and scoring work as intended before deploying to learners.
• Monitor performance data: Regularly review assessment reports to identify trends and opportunities for content improvement.
• Plan for accessibility: Consider diverse learner needs when embedding multimedia or designing complex assessment pathways.

For detailed guidance on specific quiz features or configuration steps, consult the linked resources in the Related Links section.