Welcome to our latest blog post, dedicated to equipping educators with tips to master exam writing in 2024. As the backbone of assessing students’ understanding and analytical skills, writing test questions that stimulate critical thinking and appropriately assess learning objectives is critical. In this guide, we’ll delve into practical tips and strategies designed to enhance the quality and fairness of your exam questions, ultimately fostering a conducive environment for comprehensive assessment and student success. This post is dedicated to faculty members or other educators looking to improve their item writing skills.
Who Is This Blog Post For?
Whether you’re a seasoned educator looking to refine your approach or a new teacher seeking guidance, this post is tailored to elevate your expertise in designing test questions that not only assess knowledge but also nurture the development of essential academic skills. Let’s begin to create assessments that inspire and evaluate a student’s ability with precision.
Top 10 Exam Writing Tips for Educators
- Define the Learning Objectives: Clearly outline the objectives or most important points you want to measure. This will guide the content and format of your items.
- Use Clear and Concise Language: Avoid ambiguous or confusing wording and use plain language that is easily understood by your target audience.
- Avoid Negative Wording: Negative phrasing can lead to confusion. If possible, rephrase items to have positive statements.
- Avoid Double Negatives: They can be especially confusing. If you must use them, make sure they are necessary.
- Keep Questions Focused: Each item should assess one specific skill or concept. Avoid asking multiple questions within a single item.
- Balance Difficulty: Include a mix of easy, moderate, and challenging items. Avoid making all items too easy or too difficult. The difficulty of an item is measured by the proportion value (p-value), which is an indicator of the percentage of students who answered the item correctly. The ideal range of the p-value is .30 – .70.
- >.70 – too easy
- <.30 – too hard
- Ensure Reliability and Validity: Items should measure what they are intended to measure (validity and produce consistent results (reliability).
- Avoid Tricky Questions: Items should be straightforward and not designed to trick or confuse the respondent. A good practice while reviewing your exam is to perform the “cover the options” exercise, which determines if the question can still be answered if the options are covered. Each distractor used for a question should attract between 5% and 50% of students. Distractors < 5% and > 50% should be reviewed and changed.
- Format Consistency: Use a consistent format for all items to maintain uniformity. Ensure that response options are presented consistently.
- Avoid Guessable Patterns: If using multiple-choice questions, avoid easily discernible patterns in the answers (e.g., always using “C” as the correct answer). Common flaws in answer options include:
- Too long of a correct answer (making the correct answer obvious)
- Outlier answers
- Implausible option(s)
- All of the above answer choices
Review Exam Item Performance Following the Assessment
Following the completion of the exam, it’s paramount to determine how well your items performed, to verify the reliability and validity of your exam, and also to continue to improve questions for future assessments. This is performed by a process called item discrimination, where a student’s performance on an individual question is compared to their overall performance on the entire exam. Exam software uses the top 27% (high performers) and the lowest 27% (low performers) to calculate the point biserial -rpb (Pearson’s item-to-total) correlation. This ranges from -1.00 to +1.00. A + rpb indicates that a student who scored well on the entire exam got the question correct and a – rpb score indicates that students who performed poorly on the entire exam got the item correct. A score of 0 means that high scorers performance = low scorers performance on an exam question.
Determining The Effectiveness of an Exam Question
Determining the effectiveness of an exam question requires a careful analysis of several key factors. Firstly, clarity is paramount. A well-tested question should be formulated clearly and concisely, ensuring that students can easily understand the task at hand. Ambiguity or vagueness can lead to misinterpretation, ultimately hindering the assessment of true knowledge. Additionally, the question should align with the learning objectives and the content covered in the course, ensuring that it assesses the intended skills and knowledge.
Balanced Difficulty and Student Feedback
The level of difficulty is another critical aspect; as a balanced exam should include questions that span various difficulty levels, allowing differentiation among students based on their mastery of the material being tested. Further, feedback from students and instructors can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of a question, allowing for continuous improvement in the assessment process year after year. Overall, a well-tested exam question serves as a reliable tool for evaluating a student’s understanding and application of the material.
Exam Writing Tips for Educators – Conclusion
In conclusion, mastering the art of crafting effective exam questions is an ongoing process that requires dedication, thoughtful consideration, and a commitment to fostering student success. By implementing the tips and strategies discussed in this blog post, educators can create assessments that go beyond testing rote memorization and instead encourage critical thinking and analysis. As we strive to prepare students for the challenges of the future, the role of well-designed exam questions becomes increasingly vital. Remember to continuously reflect on your assessment methods, adapt to the evolving educational landscape, and seek feedback from both students and colleagues. With these insights, educators can contribute to a learning environment that not only evaluates knowledge but also cultivates the essential skills that students need for lifelong success. Here’s to creating assessments that inspire growth, curiosity, and a passion for learning among our students.
Leland Jaffe DPM, FACFAS
Associate Professor at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science
North Chicago, Illinois
