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
6. Section 5: Developing online assessments and converting from traditional formats
   1. Designing questions for delivery by computer: 2 case studies
7. Summary

Section 5: Developing online assessments and converting from traditional formats

One of the challenges when converting to CAA is to ensure that online assessments test the same or equivalent knowledge and skills as the original. One way of validating your online assessment is to map your assessment to your learning objectives, and make sure they match. Bloom's taxonomy can help with this. The following is an outline of a procedure you can go through to develop your assessments in this way:

Matching your questions to your learning objectives

1. State the learning objective and note any verbs present in the way it is worded
2. With reference to the verbs table in section 4, match this to the appropriate level in Bloom's taxonomy
3. Design a question to test the learning objective
4. Analyse the knowledge, skills and cognitive processing required in order to answer the question and identify appropriate verbs that describe this
5. Match these to Bloom's taxonomy and check to see if the level of the question matches the learning objective.

The following graph illustrates the stages of the assessment development from step 1. "stating the learning objectives" to step 5. "matching the verbs to bloom's taxonomy"