I am very grateful for your continued participation in this discussion - you have in fact answered my question perfectly. I can now go back to my supervisors, who are number crunchers (in a non-pejorative sense), and state that there is concensus among experts in the field that it is useless to compare our data to some external standard. This position is not (only) coming from me - indeed, heated debate on a discussion board posting from the preeminent org. in the field demonstrates unequivocally that looking for external benchmarks is a non-starter. Thank you very much for your help!! This is one of the great values of Web 2.0.

KA...thanks for the kind words...but no need to put me in the expert category. Have been at this professionally for over 20 years and am still a student.

Good luck with your quest!

That is not what I meant to convey with my thank you message... I am not sure how you read that into my message.

KASprang,

Just curious as to what luck you had with the supervisors........

Thank you for asking, KaliKo. My presentation went very well; I was able to explain that internal benchmarks were the only ones that we could use with any validity, as shown by my search in the literature and this online discussion. We are continuing to collect supervisor feedback 45 days after training ends, the aggregate of which we can compare by course and by trainer. I believe it is going to prove useful as one of the metrics we use to evaluate both course and program effectiveness.