5 Tips for Creating Engaging Test Questions with QTI Assessments
Assessments play a crucial role in helping educators gauge students’ performance in a specific course and pinpoint areas where improvements can be made.
When it comes to marking up tests, examinations, quizzes, and assessments, the most used standard is called Question and Test Interoperability (QTI). The QTI format is essentially just a zip file with quiz data in XML format together with any associated multimedia files.
QTI standard enables educators across the board to create assessments on one platform and transfer them to another without much effort. This is especially useful in today’s scenario, where an increasing number of institutions are leveraging a combination of assessment tools and other similar applications.
In this post, we are going to share some important tips and best practices for creating engaging test questions with QTI assessments. Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents:
Top 5 Tips for Creating Engaging Test Questions with QTI Assessments
Below are some of the top tips for creating assessment questions that enhance engagement in your QTI assessments:
1. Determine the Goal of the Test Questions
The goal and purpose of the test questions serve as the beginning as well as the end point of question-writing and guide the overall process. The goal here could be anything based on specific teaching objectives combined with test purpose, time constraints, and difficulty coefficient.
For instance, if your purpose is to create a quick 30-minute quiz to simply review a chapter, the best is to use multiple-choice questions. Likewise, to cater to the difficulty coefficient, educators can use their experience as well as popular frameworks such as Bloom’s taxonomy or the backward design principle to determine the level of difficulty in a test.
Based on the QTI assessment framework you are creating your exam questions with, teachers should come up with a proper structure that details various content domains to be tested, question formats, the total length of the exam, and so on.
Here, you can also use Dictera, a powerful tool for content development and publishing that helps you completely redefine the content creation process by addressing the challenges of traditional testing methods.
Also Read: When to Use Formative or Summative Assessments in Education?
2. Choose an Appropriate Test Format
Another important step in creating engaging test questions is to determine the specific type of test format you are going to utilize. Among these are fill-in-the-blanks, multiple-choice questions, true or false questions, and open-ended questions.
The best way to do this is to choose the format that best gauges the cognitive abilities of students in the subject matter.
For instance, if you wish the student to compare and contrast a particular problem, it is best to add open-ended questions as they help to evaluate the student’s understanding of the subject matter.
Likewise, if you are looking to keep track of and measure the reasoning, analysis, or general comprehension skills of students in a given subject matter, it is best to go with multiple-choice test questions.
Alternatively, you can also utilize a combination of different test question types in your assessments that are available to cater to the unique learning strengths of students.
3. Offer Equal Opportunity to Demonstrate Learning
A good exam gives all students an equal and fair opportunity to demonstrate their learning.
A few of the things to take into consideration here include:
- Validity: The exam questions you include here need to purposefully relate to your course content and the respective learning goals.
- Realistic expectations: It is important to keep in mind that not all students have the ability to answer the toughest of questions all the time. Therefore, the exam questions you create should have a variety of different question types that test multiple skill levels.
- Free of bias: While creating exam questions, don’t assume that your students understand the type of language or slang you are using. This makes it critical to use language that is completely free from bias and easy for all students.
- Time and consistency: Design questions in a way that students get plenty of time to complete the exam. Likewise, the exam should be consistent in the sense that students should be able to achieve similar results if the exam were taken again.
4. Follow Progressive Structures
Another important thing to keep in mind while creating exam questions with QTI assessments is maintaining a progressive structure. The exam questions that you create should flow in a structure that begins with some easier questions and gradually gets more challenging.
Following this pattern today allows students to answer a variety of different question types and also enables them to use the exam questions to build confidence as they move to more challenging questions.
Further, the exam you come up with should be fully adaptable for students with physical or learning disabilities. This means that the exams must be amenable to various adaptive technologies, such as screen magnifiers or readers.
5. Prepare a Reasonable Marking Scheme
Lastly, it is important to develop fair and transparent marking criteria that are fair as well as comprehensive. To be able to do this, teachers need to clearly communicate with their students regarding the marking process, followed by setting clear expectations.
For instance, the marks in an exam should be distributed based on the length and scope of the question. Likewise, if a student gets the spelling of a word wrong multiple times throughout the exam, they should be marked negatively for it only once.
Also Read: How to Convert Your Test Bank to Different LMS Formats
The Bottomline
Designing a detailed and standardized process in such a scenario can be quite beneficial for educators to offer mutual assistance and complete tasks together.
Following the above tips and strategies in writing test questions allows teachers to ensure that their exams accurately assess the students’ learning outcomes with QTI assessments using the best QTI authoring tools.
Dictera can assist if you’re also searching for high-quality solutions for creating assessments that meet the strictest QTI requirements. With the help of this QTI tool driven by AI and ML, teachers can easily develop evaluations, work together in real time, and gain data-based insights into student performance.
Head over to Hurix Digital right now to discover more about Dictera’s AI-powered features!
Gokulnath B is the Associate Vice President – Editorial Services. He is PMP, CSM, and CPACC certified and has 20+ years of experience in Project Management, Delivery Management, and managing the Offshore Development Centre (ODC).