Designing Tests: Strategies to Maximize Effectiveness

Do you struggle with writing test questions? Are you unsure of how to design your tests so they more effectively assess your students? Here are a few tips.

Tip One: Provide Low Stakes Practice Tests 

Think of practice tests like practicing the piano or practicing your backhand in tennis. Practice tests are a great way to allow students to go through the process without impacting their grades, get used to question types, and set expectations for assessments in your course. A practice test can also help you determine if a particular type of question will be problematic in the graded test. Be sure to use similar format, types of questions, and settings (if online) as you plan to use in the actual test or quiz. For instance, if you include both multiple-choice and essay questions in the real test, use both question types in the practice test. 
 
If you are using online exams, practice tests are a great way to make sure that students understand how to use the online testing platform and your expectations for online exams.  By the end of the practice test, students should be comfortable with the technology and confident for their first real online exam. If the exam is proctored, it may also help alleviate some of the anxiety associated with a proctored exam. 

Tip Two: Re-Think Your Question Types

Remember the TV phenomenon, “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” The structure of the show is a great example of using multiple-choice questions in pursuit of a correct answer, but is it always the best choice to decipher knowledge? 
 
Consider the type of learning you’re trying to assess and determine the type of test question that matches it the best. For example, if you’re testing recall, a multiple-choice question might be enough, but if you’re testing a higher level of understanding, application or analysis, a short-answer or essay question might be better suited.  By combining multiple-choice, short-answer and essay questions, you provide your students with multiple avenues to show you what they’re learning and where they might be struggling. 
 
Questions should require critical thinking, not just regurgitating information. You want to see how students can apply what they’ve learned. How do you know whether your questions require students to think critically? A good litmus test is to ask how easily the answer could be found with an online search. If it’s just a click away, try making it a bit more engaging. By asking questions that apply your course information to their lived experiences, you also help your students engage with the material and increase their chances of succeeding in your course. 
 
Multiple-choice questions are the de facto question types in many courses. There are certain best practices which can make the tried-and-true question type more engaging and less of a guessing game or the process of elimination.  For every multiple-choice question there are a few considerations:   

• Is your stem (the question, itself) clear?  
• Are all your answer choices approximately the same number of words? 
• Do you have a detractor (an answer that looks feasible, but is a red herring)? 
• Do you offer between three to five answer choices? Students can answer three-choice questions more quickly, which allows you to cover more content and items in the test, thereby increasing test validity and reliability. 
• Do you use ‘all of the above’ or ‘none of the above’? In either case, students can use partial knowledge to arrive at a correct answer.

Tip Three: Be Strategic with Online Exams

Online exams aren’t much different from in-class assessments. While there are formatting best practices and settings that will help enable your students’ success, your core content and questions will likely translate well to online use.  
 
The main difference with online exams is that instructors have less control over the testing environment. Because of this, when creating questions, it’s important to employ additional strategies that will help motivate students to study and succeed in exams — in part by making dishonesty more difficult. 
 
One of the best features online exams have to offer is the question bank (Blackboard calls them pools) — a solution that helps you keep your students on their toes, make sure they’re engaged with the content and mix things up from student to student. To use the question bank to its full potential, you’ll need to create more questions than actually needed (for instance, if your exam has 20 multiple-choice questions, create 30). When your students take the test, the system will randomize which questions are pulled for which students, making sure that no two exams are the same.   
 
Another way to make sure they’re on their toes is to use randomization features. In addition to shuffling questions, you can also randomize answers so that, even when two students get the same question, the multiple-choice answer options come in a different order.  

Tip Four: Reach Out to the Learning Design Team!

The Instructional Design team is here to help you create test questions in your course. Please reach out to learningdesign@bentley.edu or to a specific instructional designer for ideas and help.

Upcoming Workshop: Enhancing Your Course with Storytelling

Engage your students with interactive activities. Supplement your course with infographics. Add quizzes into your videos. Insert conversational scenarios to give students choices. Join Debra Mascott for this workshop and explore lots of tools to enhance your courses.

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