Estimating the Impact of Health and Safety Training Using the Retrospective Pretest Design

Abstract

An alternative to the traditional pretest/postest method of assessing training program effectiveness from hazardous waste worker training, called the retrospective pretest design, is explored in this study. In the retrospective pretest design, trainee self-reports about their knowledge, skills, abilities, and/or attitudes are obtained only after the completion of the training, not before. Trainees provide two types of self-reports: (1) the traditional posttraining outcome responses and (2) responses on how they would have answered those same outcome items before they participated in the health and safety program. These latter responses are known as retrospective pretests, and comparison of the two responses for an item is considered a better measure of true change due to training than the traditional pretraining and posttraining responses to the same item. Data from five types of hazardous waste worker health and safety training curricula (40-hour site worker; 24-hour treatment, storage, and disposal; 24-hour municipal emergency response; 24-hour industrial emergency response; 8-hour site supervisor) with over 2100 trainees are used to study the potential utility of the retrospective pretest design. In all five curricula and for the three outcome items used in this study, the differences between retrospective pretraining and posttraining means were significantly greater than the differences between the traditional pretraining/posttraining means. Based upon these results and supporting research by others, the use of the retrospective pretest design is recommended as a component in evaluations of health and safety programs to characterize the impact of training more fully.