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
4. Section 3: Questions at different learning levels
5. Section 4: Writing effective objective questions
   1. Principles for writing good questions
   2. Suggestions for writing good distracters
   3. Matching questions
   4. Suggestions for writing true/false questions
6. Section 5: Developing online assessments and converting from traditional formats
7. Summary

Principles for writing good questions

There follows some advice on best practice for constructing some common question types.

Suggestions for writing good stems

• Present a single, definite statement to be completed or answered by one of the several given choices.
• Avoid unnecessary and irrelevant material.
• Use clear, straightforward language in the stem of the item. Questions that are constructed using complex wording may become a test of reading comprehension rather than an assessment of whether the student knows the subject matter.
• Use negatives sparingly. If negatives must be used, capitalise, underscore embolden or otherwise highlight.
• Put as much of the question in the stem as possible, rather than duplicating material in each of the options. (Gronlund 1988)