This week, I have chosen to blog about the following topic.

Anatomy of a Question

Make a public blog post sharing some well-written question that challenge higher order thinking. Explain to your potential audience what makes this a question worth asking students. Think of this as an opportunity to help other teachers in your subject area understand some of what you learned in this unit through a case study.

Honestly, I took this assignment and twisted it to suit my purposes. I hope that is all right. 🙂

A Confession

I must admit that my experience creating online assessments is limited to my training days, when I would assess users’ knowledge of the applications that were the subject of the training. I did not get too complex with my questions; instead, I tried to find out if they were actually paying attention during the training and hands-on practice or if they were more interested in their mobile phone and email. I also knew that the participants did not have as much time with the topics as someone participating in a traditional course, so my hope was that they would take what they have learned and apply it once they were back at their desks, using the job aids I gave them. My assessments were better than smiley-sheets, but not by much.

That’s not to say I did not try the other types of assessments. I did! They failed miserably. I believe that might be because I did not have as much time with my students as a traditional teacher and so many of my students had been out of school so long they were ‘out of practice.’ Or, it could just be that I did not create successful assessments.

So, I am back to the problem of lack of practice. That needs to change, so this is a good opportunity to make that change.

One more note: When I was teaching, I saved the higher-order questions for the short answer and essay. Since we are talking about online assessment, however, I am going to avoid those types of questions and focus on multiple choice. Of course I know that you can administer the short answer and essay questions in online assessment, but I consider my experience with multiple choice questions my Achilles’ heel.

A Quiz

[slickquiz id=2]

I struggled mightily with the very short quiz above, because I would be much more comfortable giving the students essay questions or short answer questions to “formatively” assess their understanding of the novel. I actually put a twist on this assignment, but since this is a non-graded course, I am taking a risk and asking for help with my questions rather than researching “well written questions” (which I did) and posting them here. I hope no one minds!

I’m moving on now! Thanks for reading.