Designing tests is an important part of assessing students understanding of course content and their level of competency in applying what they are learning. Whether you use low-stakes and frequent evaluations–quizzes–or high-stakes and infrequent evaluations–midterm and final–careful design will help provide more calibrated results. The reason(s) for giving a test will help you determine features such as length, format, level of detail required in answers, and
the time frame for returning results to the students. Multiple choice questions can be difficult to write, especially if you want students to go beyond recall of information, but the exams are easier to grade than essay or short-answer exams. On the other hand, multiple choice exams provide less
opportunity than essay or short-answer exams for you to determine how well the students can think about the course content or use the language of the discipline in responding to questions. If you decide you want to test mostly recall of information or facts and you need to do so in the most efficient way, then you should consider using multiple choice tests. The following ideas may be helpful as you begin to plan for a multiple choice exam:
This information can help you identify areas in which students need further work, and can also help you assess the test itself: Were the questions worded clearly? Was the level of difficulty appropriate? If scores are uniformly high, for example, you may be doing everything right, or have an unusually good class. On the other hand, your test may not have measured what you intended it to. Essay questions
When are essay exams appropriate?
How do you design essay exams?
How do you grade essay exams?
How do you help students succeed on essay exams?
Assessing your testRegardless of the kind of exams you use, you can assess their effectiveness by asking yourself some basic questions:
Which test may be used for both screening and progress monitoring of vocabulary?The EVT-2 is a norm-referenced vocabulary assessment tool that can be used: as a screening tool in clinical and school settings, • for progress monitoring in language learning environments, • in research with speech-language pathologists, psychologists, and early childhood specialists.
What are the benefits of having students write in response to text?Responding to text in writing has been shown to support comprehension, for both students in general and students who are weaker readers or writers in particular. This applies across expository and narrative texts as well as in content areas such as science and social studies (Graham & Hebert, 2011).
What sentence writing skills is the most challenging for students to learn?sentences. The most challenging aspect for novice writers in English is a verb in the sentence. Students also find it challenging to understand the difference between 'is' and 'are' as main and helping verbs. For most of them, these verbs cannot be main verbs.
What is the main way in which mentor texts are used?Mentor texts are written pieces that serve as an example of good writing for student writers. The texts are read for the purpose of studying the author's craft, or the way the author uses words and structures the writing. The goal is to provide students a model they could emulate in crafting their own piece.
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