How to create the perfect quiz for your online course
The Assessment – It’s a phenomenon that all educators have wrapped their creative minds around for decades. Coming through the doors of education, an assessment evaluates the knowledge of key concepts and lessons learned. Assessments can even evaluate personal characteristics such as the strengths and weaknesses of test taking skills. As a continuing education provider, you should be able to understand, apply, and evaluate content to create an assessment that accurately depicts true knowledge and comprehension.
Frankly, assessment creation is a creative process! A great way to think about it is to compare this process to an interview or getting to know someone. For example, consider what you need to know about your students. Your search for knowledge from this quiz would be likely based on your overall goal(s) and/or objective(s). You might even create the quiz in a fashion where each question is dedicated to a goal or objective, as content reflects meeting that deliverable.
In this article, we’ll review some simple steps to build an assessment that ensures your students are proficient in your continuing education content. It starts with organization and distribution, then level of question difficulty, question type, and lastly a review for fluidity and cohesiveness. When you are organized, you can select content that is clearly written from your presentation or handout materials. The more direct and clear your questions are, with proper grammar and language, the greater chance your students will remember the content - and pass!
Step 1: Organization and Distribution
Review your content and decide what key concepts are most appropriate to quiz based on your audience. Perhaps it’s a topic you and your students focused a great deal on in your program. Or, it’s a topic some or most of your students have struggled to grasp. Your goal when quizzing them is to ensure the progress of their learning. Students will only have three attempts to pass, so your quiz should be a snapshot of your program’s most important content boiled down to eight (8) questions per instructional hour. For example, if your online course consists of video clips and content that adds up to 6 hours, you will be required to include at least 48 questions (8 questions x 6 hours = 48 questions) on your quiz.
Step 2: Level of Question Difficulty
Review the materials you have gathered from your program content. The decision here is to choose questions that align with the APA expectation that questions be appropriate for doctoral level psychologists. Consider how difficult it will be for your students to meet the pass/fail threshold, which is >70% for 1 credit programs and >75% for programs with 2 or more credits.
Step 3: Question Type
There are numerous ways to address the assessment of any topic, but the most important thing to ask yourself is whether the way questions are being asked align with the background, knowledge, and skill level of the students. To better ensure that your assessment is free of potential errors and biases, we only allow True or False and Multiple Choice questions when building quizzes for co-sponsorship applications. Per 8 questions (per credit hour) only one (1) of those questions can be a true or false question. There are several guidelines to consider when writing these questions. Lastly, in the software today, the question’s order is being randomized for each student.
Do this…
True or False
When creating a True or False question, build the question on two variables or factors so the student has two parts of truthfulness and falsity within the question to assess. For example, a true/false question can include two facts, but only one of them aligns with the question’s focus. This portion of the question reflects the correct response to the question. The student will choose what makes sense based on facts and even intuition. Visually, true or false questions house less information/words to filter through in comparison to multiple choice questions, where at least 4-6 lines of information appear. True or false questions can reflect content of an easy level of difficulty.
Multiple Choice
When creating multiple choice questions, final options should only say “all the above” or “none of the above” rather than alternative phrasing meant to confuse students. When writing your quiz, limit yourself to one multiple choice question that includes an “all the above” or “none of the above” option per instructional hour. This is a general rule for a quiz that is at least eight (8) questions in total per credit hour. The software will automatically include and capitalize the option’s letters (A, B, C, etc.) in a multiple-choice question, so you don’t have to.
Let your question and the way you present the question be bold. Rely on questions that test a participant’s comprehension and application of examples that relate to your program’s content. Plucking information from slides and written material can often be effective for hammering home major points. Lastly, include questions that match a postdoctoral level of learning, or that are specific to the program’s defined learning objectives, but avoid adding extra variables to “trick” students.
Be fair by asking fairly. This also goes for challenging students – asking questions using the following guidelines help us be fair.
Don’t do this…
True or False
When creating True/False questions, don’t create more than one (1) of these per 8 questions.
Multiple Choice
When creating multiple choice questions, do not use options that include multiple letters, such as “A and B” or “Neither B nor C'', as these tend to cause unnecessary confusion.
Avoid writing “fill in the blank” questions as this has the potential to produce an array of responses from students. Here is an example of what a “fill in the blank” multiple choice question looks like:
You should _________ hug a client when they are in distress.
Never
Always
Sometimes
Although this type of multiple choice question setup may be acceptable for others, we would like to advise against building a question in this manner for your audience.
Don’t choose “all the above” or “none of the above” as the actual answer to the question, but these can be choices.
Don’t create “incorrect” choices that are extremely obvious to your audience. Remember, your questions must address a postdoctoral level of learning.
Don’t focus heavily on dates, statistics, or other content that may not be relevant to the learning objectives or program content. Why? Are statistics not important anymore? They are great for discussion, reports, essays, and more. But for a quiz at this academic and professional level, application to real-world scenarios and the meaning of concepts come to the front of the line.
Students often develop a perception about true or false questions – that they will always be easy. However, because you can only use 1 true or false question for each instructional hour, you can’t rely on beginner level true or false questions as the sole measure of learning.
Step 4: Check for Fluidity and Cohesiveness
Language, grammar, and flow – check it all once you are done. Remember to use spell check, too! You might consider using a spelling and grammar tool such as www.grammarly.com. It is user-friendly and in minutes provides you with clearer language for your quiz. From there, the most efficient way to check the fluidity and cohesiveness of your quiz is by taking it yourself. How much energy are you putting into it? Do any of the questions have you thinking about other topics or comparing at least two variables? Do you feel challenged? Even though you created the questions, if they are strong and applicable enough to your audience, you should feel the way you intend for students to experience them.
Step 5: Import your Quiz
Once you’ve written your quiz, you can easily import it into your online course application using our template here. After importing, always make sure to double check that the answers were recorded correctly.
So, remember – creative process, key concepts, follow guidelines, check your work, and put yourself in your student’s shoes.
Written by Anna Cicirale, M.A. (ABD)
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