Assessing student learning is harder than it may seem. When planning test, quizzes, or other assessments, use these tricks to write challenging rather than trick questions.

1. DON’T
Your Students
CHALLENGE
ThemTrick
5
Five Tips for Writing
Challenging Rather
Than Trick Questions
Use a test
blueprint.
It ensures that each item
evaluates an important
concept or skill.
Make your tests
open-book,
open-note.
Tell students they can bring to the test anything
they like, except a friend or the means to
communicate with one. Using open-book,
open-note tests forces you to eliminate items based on simple knowledge
that students can look up.Your test will include only items that help develop
deeper comprehension and thinking skills.
Create
interpretive
exercises.
They encourage thinking skills such
as application and analysis.
Build items
around common
misconceptions.
Many people, for example, think that plants
get nutrients only from soil and water, not air;
this misconception can become the basis of
an effective botany test question.
Evaluate your
test results.
Revise any misleading or
unnecessarily difficult items before
including them in another test.
Excerpt from Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide,Second Edition,
by Linda Suskie
ISBN: 978-0-470-28964-8
384 pages