Writing Effective Quiz Questions

Introduction

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 page is to provide easy-to-follow, quick-to-read guidance for creating questions of varied types such as matching, multiple-choice, short answer, true-false and more.

Best Practices for Creating Effective Quiz Questions

  • Use the tools available in Canvas to develop questions, analyze outcomes and provide feedback.
  • Research ways to craft effective quiz questions and stay current with standards in assessment development. 
  • Consider how the types of questions you ask can influence how students study, read, practice, etc. 

Definitions

Constructed response items 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 more difficult 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.

Alignment of Objectives, Instruction and Assessment

Your learning objectives, lesson content and activities, and assessments should all align with each other. In other words, you should strive to match your assessments for a given lesson to the lesson objectives, whether those objectives are cognitive, affective, or psychomotor:

  • Cognitive Objectives relate to what a student should know or understand
  • Affective Objectives emphasize a feeling, tone or emotion of acceptance or rejection
  • Psychomotor Objectives are concerned with how a student controls or moves their body

In higher education, most learning objectives, lesson content and activities, and assessment fall into the cognitive domain, and Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives Links to an external site.is the most common model for writing cognitive objectives.

You can also use Bloom's Taxonomy to help align your assessment questions with your objectives. The perfect time to think about your assessments is while you are writing your objectives. Incorporating key verbs from measurable objectives Links to an external site. based on Blooms Taxonomy of Learning Domains into your objectives is one way to forecast the types of assessment you will use to measure students’ achievement of those objectives.  

Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence: Learning Goals and Objectives (video) Links to an external site. identifies the terms learning goals and learning objectives.  You will also be able to evaluate the clarity of existing learning objectives and then formulate your own objectives.

Question Types

Each question type offers validity to assessing student's knowledge and understanding of the skill and concepts being assessed.  Learn about the various question types and how to create a quiz utilizing each by visiting the Canvas Instructor Guide: New Quizzes Links to an external site. in the Canvas Community.

Not sure which question type to use? Download this Designing Assessments: Common Item Types (PSU resource guide created in collaboration with the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence) to help select the quiz question types most suitable for your needs.

For more in-depth information about designing effective Multiple Choice quiz questions please visit Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence(SITE) Links to an external site.

You can also follow these steps in this text tutorial to create your individual quiz questions.

Validity and Reliability

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 validity and reliability.

  • Validity refers to whether a test measures what its intended purpose is to measure.
  • Reliability refers to the test scores being consistent with different testing occasions, different editions of the test, or different raters scoring the test.  

You can improve your quiz questions with a validity and reliability analysis. Ensure your questions are better understood by students and reduce grading disputes. Conducting this evaluation requires an in-depth understanding of quiz construction and access to statistical tools. Please visit the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence Links to an external site. to learn more and to arrange a consultation on improving your quizzes.

Accessibility

All quizzes and quiz questions should be optimized for accessibility. This includes basic text formatting, providing time extensions on quizzes, including text transcripts for audio files, captioning videos, and other adjustments to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to achieve. Here are the common items you should address.

  • Text: Use headings and subheadings for all text.
  • Images and Tables: All images and tables should include ALT text (for screen readers). Tables should have table headers.
  • Quizzes: You may need to extend time to take a quiz, both in the amount of time allowed as they take the quiz, and the total number of days it is available.
  • Audio and Video Files: You should include corresponding text transcripts students can access. If you are using video files they should be captioned.

For more information on accessibility, including information about accessibility in Canvas specifically, see the Penn State Accessibility Web site. Links to an external site.

Additional Resources