How to Create Great Assessments

Here’s a question for you:

Have you ever taken an online course where you could relate to any of the following regarding the assessment questions in the course?

A.?????The correct answer was almost always choice A

B.?????You didn’t understand what was being asked

C.?????The questions did not relate to what was covered in the content

D.????You were asked to select what was NOT a valid answer choice

E.?????The longest answer was the correct answer

F.??????The functionality of the question format was unclear or faulty

G.????There were an annoying number of answer choices to any question

H.????The last option was almost always “All of the above” or “None of the above”

If you (mentally) selected any of these options as you scanned through the list of choices, you may have come to realize that all of these practices, in fact, should be avoided when creating good assessment questions.

Writing good assessment questions is an art, but one that can be learned and practiced. A well-thought-out assessment holds a course together and helps you and learners themselves gauge how well they have understood the course content and where they have struggled.

There are two main kinds of assessments—formative assessments and summative assessments.

Formative assessments help build learner knowledge and are presented at intermediate intervals throughout the course (e.g., at the end of each module within a course). These assessments give learners opportunities to practice what they have learned in a safe space and build their confidence as they progress through the course. Learners are given immediate feedback to help correct their understanding and identify learning gaps.

Summative assessments are delivered at the end of the course and are considered more “high-stakes” for learners than formative assessments. The purpose of summative assessments is to test the learners’ understanding of the course content in its entirety and show evidence of learning proficiency as it aligns with the learning goals. Typically, the scores attained in the summative assessment determine if learners have passed the course or need to retake it.

Regardless of the type of assessment you want to design, the best practices remain the same. Let’s unpack some of these best practices.

1.?????Align the questions with the learning goals. For any online course, the learning goals, course content, and assessment questions all need to be tightly aligned with each other to ensure a cohesive learning experience. Learning goals should also guide the level of understanding/knowledge/skills that you’re testing for. For example, let’s say you need to create compliance training on anti-harassment. Ask yourself, “What should learners be able to do after completing this course?”. If a learning objective is for learners to be able to “Differentiate between the different types of harassment”, a corresponding assessment question should test learners at that level. Presenting learners with a series of scenarios for them to identify the type of harassment each scenario portrays may be a better way to test their knowledge than asking them to recite definitions of the different types of harassment.

2.?????Leverage a range of question types. Common question types include multiple-choice questions, multiple answer questions, drag and drop, matching, fill-in-the-blank, and open text. Different question types can be used for different purposes. As we saw in the anti-harassment compliance training example above, scenario-based questions help learners apply their understanding to realistic situations. But a matching or fill-in-the-blank type of question may be better suited to help them memorize the different types of harassment in the first place.

?3.?????Keep the language clear and concise. Avoid jargon where possible and keep the language of the questions simple and to the point. For each assessment question, learners should know exactly what is expected of them. For example, for a multiple-response question, you can instruct them to “Select all that apply”. This would indicate to them that there may be more than one correct answer choice. After you’ve created your questions, re-evaluate them to make sure that they’re easy to understand and do not include any superfluous information.

?4.?????Ensure parity across answer choices. There are primarily two aspects to this—parity in length and construction. All too often, we’ve noticed that the longest answer choice is typically the correct answer. Answer choices should be similar in length so that the length does not act as a factor in how learners approach a question. Similarly, answer choices should be consistent in how they’re structured, the tense that they use, and how they’re phrased.

?5.?????Avoid negative questions. Negative questions can be confusing, and learners need to work harder to decode them. An extension of this is including “None of the above” as an answer choice in a question. Negative questions can also detract from the purpose of assessment questions by not aligning themselves well with the learning objectives. If we go back to the example above and consider the learning objective “Identify the different types of harassment”, asking a question such as “Which of the following is NOT a type of harassment?” is a poor example of alignment.

?6.?????Ensure your questions adequately reflect the learning content. Frequently, we come across questions that test insignificant portions of the content or that introduce new information not previously covered in the content. In the case of the former, learners miss opportunities to reinforce key learning points. In the case of the latter, learners get confused and demotivated. However, if you ensure that the learning objectives, course content, and assessment questions are properly aligned, you will likely not run into this issue.

?7.?????Check for overlaps. A common gaffe when creating assessment questions is that the feedback for one question sometimes reveals the answer to another question. As with language, this is another area where re-evaluating your assessment questions after you have scripted them can help. Check for overlaps between any feedback and questions and eliminate redundancies, as applicable.

?8.?????Use assessment questions to correct common misconceptions. One of the strengths of assessment questions, particularly formative assessments, is to target common misconceptions and help correct them. When creating assessments, ask yourself if there are any concepts that learners typically struggle with. What are some common misconceptions that learners may have about those concepts? How might you use the assessment questions to reinforce learning and rectify those misconceptions?

?9.?????Ensure your distractors (incorrect answer choices) are plausible. Assessment questions are meant to help you and the learners understand if they’ve achieved the learning goals of the course. The purpose is not to trick learners into selecting incorrect answer choices and trip them up. To enable learners to apply themselves, ensure that your distractors are plausible but unarguably incorrect. By the same token, it is important to avoid give-away answer choices. If learners can guess the correct answer to a question without really needing to go through the course, that could imply that the assessment was too easy.

In addition to these best practices, gamifying assessment questions can also help elevate and enrich the overall learning experience. Take a look at some of these fun interactive assessment templates from Raptivity: Spin the Wheel, Open Book Challenge, Balloon Pop,?Mountain Climb, and Bowling Rush. Then, there’s also QuilliQuiz by Quillionz, a fantastic AI-powered platform for creating self-assessments.

I hope you find these tips useful when creating your next assessment. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in my previous article on how to provide good feedback.

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