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

Matching questions

Matching items require students to match a series of stems or premises to a response or principle. They consist of a set of directions, a column of statements and a column of responses.

Matching questions are really a variation of the multiple choice format. If you find that you are writing MCQs which share the same answer choices, you may consider grouping the questions into a matching item. Tips for writing good matching questions include:

• Provide clear directions
• Keep the information in each column as homogeneous as possible
• Allow the responses to be used more than once
• Arrange the list of responses systematically if possible (chronological, alphabetical, numerical)
• Include more responses than stems to help prevent students using a process of elimination to answer question.