Writing assessment questions for online delivery: Principles and guidelines

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Section 1: Overall issues in computer assessment delivery
3. Section 2: Choosing an appropriate question style
   1. Multiple choice and variants
   2. Anatomy of a Multiple Choice Question
   3. True or False
   4. Multiple response
   5. True False Don't Know (TFD)
   6. Extended MCQ
   7. Matching and variants
   8. Extended matching
   9. Matching: Ranking/Ordering
   10. Matching: Drag and drop
   11. Free response questions and variants
   12. Cloze tests
4. Section 3: Questions at different learning levels
5. Section 4: Writing effective objective questions
6. Section 5: Developing online assessments and converting from traditional formats
7. Summary

Matching: Ranking/Ordering

If you want to test students' knowledge of a sequence, for example the order in which the stages of a process occur, or the different levels of a hierarchy, a conventional way of doing this with a pen and paper test is to use a Multiple choice question containing correct and incorrect versions of the sequence, like this:

An ordering exercise presented as an MCQ

However CAA enables us instead to use a ranking/ordering question, like this:

An ordering exercise presented as an ordering question

This approach has two main advantages:

1. The number of options that the student has to choose from is much increased, making the question harder, and meaning that they have to construct the sequence rather than recognise it from a list.
2. It is much quicker to author.