After you have written your quiz questions, aligning them with your objectives and instruction along the way, you will be off to an excellent start, but there is one more step to take to ensure your quizzes are as effective as possible: evaluating your quiz for reliability and validity.
Conducting that evaluation requires an in-depth understanding of quiz construction and access to statistical tools. Fortunately, at Penn State, faculty have access to experts on those topics at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. Consider contacting them to arrange a consultation.A quiz is valid if it measures what you intend to measure. Quiz validity is also the extent to which inferences, conclusions, and decisions made on the basis of quiz scores are appropriate and meaningful. Any quiz must be valid before it is reliable.
A quiz is reliable if it is consistent and stable over time in measuring what you intend to measure. Imagine that you had an oven that, when set to a temperature of 250 degrees for 20 minutes, sometimes burned the same type and amount of food and sometimes did not cook it adequately. The temperature gauge on your oven would be unreliable.
Doing this requires an in-depth understanding of quiz construction and access to statistical tools. Fortunately, at Penn State individuals at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence possess both. Consider contacting them to arrange a consultation.
See Penn State’s Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence list of assessment resources.
Assessment Resources
Develop valid and reliable questions
Writing Multiple-choice Questions that Require Critical Thinking
How to examine and improve your quiz questions
Develop non-graded sample quizzes