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

Cloze tests

A cloze test involves a piece of text, from which a number of words have been removed. The student is required to insert the missing words. In some cases the missing words are supplied as a single list, from which the student has to select. In this case one is effectively matching a word with the space where it belongs - thus it is a matching question.

A cloze matching question

However a problem with such questions is that they are hard to design in a way that does not give away the answers. More common, and a lot more difficult, is a multiple choice cloze test, where each gap has its own separate list of words to choose from, as in this example:

A cloze mcq question

A final type of cloze question is where no options are presented and the missing words have to be supplied by the student.