Student generated test questions

Presenter: Deepika Badampudi
Department of Software Engineering, DIPT

Problem

Changes in the mode of education (remote/on-campus) due to the pandemic has emphasized existing challenges such as low attendance rate. In addition, active student participation is often challenging regardless of the education mode.

Potential intervention

Using student-generated questions for student-centered assessment. The type of assessment can influence students’ attitudes toward learning . Questions generated by students allow students to reflect on their learning. It also allows students to demonstrate an understanding of the learning outcomes.

 

1. Submission of questions – The objective is not just to ask students to submit questions; instead, the students should motivate why their selected questions are important for learning. In addition, the students should also provide alternative answers (typically four) and a motivation for why each alternative is correct or wrong.
2. Evaluation of questions – Evaluation is based on how students select, formulate, and motivate the importance of the questions. In addition, how students choose the alternative answers (tricky or straightforward) and justify the right and wrong alternatives.
3. Creation of the question bank – The teacher selects good questions from the submission to create a question bank. The idea is to add more questions each year and expand the question bank.
4. Creation of the quiz – The teacher creates the quiz by selecting the questions from the question bank. The questions can be a collection of questions from current and previous year students’ submissions.
5. Discussion of the quiz results – After the quiz, the teacher discusses the overall results (not individual). For example, why some students selected the wrong alternatives. The discussions are interactive. The students also participate in the reasoning for choosing the alternatives.

Outcomes

When the students are asked to formulate questions based on the content taught in the lectures, they are more motivated to attend the lectures. Gamification: The students should select alternatives that are difficult to answer. If the students’ questions are selected in the exam, and if most of the class cannot answer correctly, then the student who submitted the question participates in the discussion actively. In addition, the teachers can understand which concepts need more explanation and can elaborate more on those concepts.

Challenges

Students can submit poor questions. Mitigation – Give instructions on the level of questions expected (blooms taxonomy). Relying on students for quiz questions can be risky, particularly if the students do not submit good questions. Mitigation – Reserve some questions as a backup. Create a question bank containing good questions from every cohort. The teachers can generate a few questions in the first year as a backup.

 

Best Practice Poster: Student generated test questions