Writing assessment questions for online delivery: Principles and guidelines

This guide has presented a range of question styles and their variants, and pointed out some of the appropriate uses of each type. This raised issues such as preventing students from guessing, and the difference between the student recognising the correct answer and constructing it for him/herself. It pointed out that text entry questions may be a solution to this but that they need to be handled with care and may not be suitable for summative testing.

It has introduced Bloom's taxonomy of learning objectives, and suggested that this may be useful in analysing questions to identify what they are testing, and to write

questions that test more than simple recall.It has presented two question formats that can lend themselves to creating more cognitively demanding questions (Assertion/Reason and Data Analysis).

The later sections presented some guidelines for writing effective questions, and illustrated some of the potential pitfalls. Finally an approach was suggested for redesigning existing assessments for computer delivery, and two University of Bristol teaching staff described their own experience of doing this.