Creating Effective Blackboard Quizzes: Writing Good Questions and Avoiding Bad Ones, Exercises of Design

Download Creating Effective Blackboard Quizzes: Writing Good Questions and Avoiding Bad Ones and more Exercises Design in PDF only on Docsity! Using Blackboard quizzes for assessment 1 Using Blackboard quizzes for assessment Blackboard’s Quiz tool has a rich feature set that enables you to create and deliver sophisticated online assessments. This guide aims to help you create effective assessments using the Quiz tool. How to write good questions Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are often criticised for their inability to test more than recall of facts, but this is a misconception and well-designed questions can effectively test higher-order learning outcomes. You should start by reading this paper: Scully, Darina (2017) Constructing Multiple-Choice Items to Measure Higher-Order Thinking, Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation: Vol. 22 , Article 4. It uses the revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives as a framework to list the verbs associated with each and shows how those can be used as keywords when writing questions. Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis * Evaluation * Identify Define Know List Name Recognize State Describe Differentiate Discuss Explain Rephrase Restate Reword Apply Calculate Classify Develop Examine Solve Use Analyse Categorize Compare Contrast Distinguish Determine Investigate Compose Construct Create Design Formulate Modify Plan Appraise Assess Evaluate Judge * Note that it is very difficult to create questions that test Synthesis or Evaluation. It goes on to outline four techniques that can be used to write good questions on this foundation: 1. Manipulation of verbs that assess higher-level outcomes by replacing them with their noun derivative and preceding them with a knowledge-level verb. e.g. ‘explain’ can be replaced with ‘Identify the most accurate explanation’ 2. Item flipping presents a specific instance of a concept in the question stem and asks the student to identify the correct concept. The key, as usual, is to have effective distracters (incorrect answers) that are plausible but similar concepts. 3. Use of high quality distracters that require strong understanding of the topic. One option is to require students to identify the ‘best answer’ where all the answers are true to some degree. It is vital that the academic authors agree on the ‘best answer’. 4. Tapping ‘multiple neurons’ is an approach to creating questions that require an understanding of the interconnections between knowledge. It is recommended that all questions should be designed as ‘two-neuron’ items. The paper clearly explains all these techniques in detail and includes illustrative examples of each. The author concludes with a useful discussion of issues around validity i.e. whether questions effectively test the desired learning outcomes. If you are unfamiliar with Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) revision of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom & Krathwohl, 1956), we highly recommend this 3-page guide and especially the graphic on page 3 which plots Bloom's cognitive processes against four knowledge domains (factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive) and provides simple examples at each level. A Model of Learning Objectives – based on A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by Rex Heer, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Iowa State University • Bonus resource: 50 ways to use Bloom’s taxonomy in class with extra ‘digital learning’ verbs.