Assess Ch. 6

Abstract:
“Every test question should be important enough to ask and clear enough to answer.” Teachers should create a variety or questions ranging from multiple choice and fill in the blank, to analogies and open-ended questions; mixing these ‘forced-choice’ questions with ‘constructive response’ questions is beneficial for seeing the big picture of students’ concept mastery. We are not designing the questions as trick questions; we want them to be clear and concise since we are checking for understanding and mastery, not clerical duties. Questions should not be designed for grading ease either, since students can pick up on patterns. Our questions needed to be directed for assessing what we want to assess.

Reflection:
We got some great tips from this chapter about making test questions. We’ve had experiences where we knew the answer to the question, but answered incorrectly due to tricky wording, and it can be frustrating. This chapter stresses how to make test questions, right to the point, fun, varied, and positive. Test taking is stressful enough, we don’t need to make it harder on our students by giving them boring, misleading questions that don’t prove any comprehension. We agreed with having easier questions in the front of the test and working towards the harder questions builds students’ confidence. Nothing is worse than getting stumped on the first question on the test.