Writing Effective Quiz Questions Overview
Effective questions can engage students in learning by helping them reflect on course content, develop problem-solving skills, form mental models, or practice foundational skills. Questioning focuses attention and guides study, reading, writing, communication, visualization, design, development, and other learning activities.
The main goal of this mini-site is to provide easy-to-follow, quick-to-read guidance for creating questions of varied types such as matching, multiple-choice, short answer, and true-false.
Why Worry About Writing Quiz Questions?
- Canvas at Penn State has tools to facilitate asking questions, analyzing outcomes, and providing feedback.
- Knowing how to write effective questions is critical to using these tools effectively.
- The types of questions teachers ask influence what and how students study, read, practice, etc.
- The questions you ask should match what you expect students to learn.
- Questions should not give away the answers or be unreasonably difficult.
Definitions
- Constructed response item types provide students with a prompt and require them to generate an answer. Examples include short answer and essay. Typically, supplied response items are easier to write but harder to score.
- Selected response item types provide students with all possible answers and require them to select the correct one. Selected response type items include multiple choice, matching, and true/false and are typically harder to write but easier to score.