Assessment Creation

When creating an assessment item, I found the easiest part to be creating the stem, and the hardest part to be creating incorrect leafs.  I could easily think of a topic I wanted to cover, put it in question form, but then had a difficult time coming up with options that were indeed wrong, without appearing to be “tricky” or misleading.  I also had to be very conscious not to give away too much information to the question in the stem itself.  For example, in one stem I intended to give a definition and have the learner choose the correct term.  In the definition of criterion-referenced I used the word criteria, which would easily give away the answer even to the most clueless of students.  I found it helpful to use the thesaurus in MS Word to help overcome this problem.

I did not need to need to modify my original objectives once I began creating questions.  I knew this was an option and considered doing so at times, but was able to design assessment items that matched all of my objectives. 

Below is an example of one of my best assessment items:

12.)  In education there are four references commonly used for interpreting the performance of learners.  Read the following example and identify the type of interpretation demonstrated.  In Miss Mary’s first grade class, all of the students are given a short quiz at the beginning of the year.  At the end of the year Miss Mary gives the students the quiz again.

                A.            Ability-referenced

                B.            Growth-referenced

                C.            Norm-referenced

                D.            Criterion-referenced

Correct Answer: B – Growth-referenced compared the learner’s performance to their prior performance.

Incorrect Answer: A – Ability-referenced interprets the learners’ performance in light of that individual’s maximum performance.

Incorrect Answer: C – Norm-referenced interpretation compares the learners’ performance to that of others.

Incorrect Answer: D – Criterion-referenced describes what the learner can and cannot do.

Performance Objective:  (Chapter 6) Given an example, correctly identify the type of interpretation demonstrated.