Welcome

Welcome to the UW Teaching Academy short-course "Exam Question Types and Student Competencies." This course will examine what kinds of question types are best for assessing desired student learning and comprehension. Through informed selection of test questions, you can ensure a more accurate evaluation of how well your students have mastered course material.

What Does This Course Cover?

When are matching questions preferable to multiple-choice? How well can short-answer questions assess higher-order thinking? In every college course, there is knowledge on many levels that students are asked to master. From factual information like names, dates, or formulas to more advanced knowledge that requires an understanding of how concepts relate to one another, your students are asked to tackle the information that you provide in reading, discussions, and lecture presentations. But how do you go about assessing what they've learned? How can you develop exams that get at what the students know, whether simple facts or complex concepts? The goal of this course is to provide information that can assist you in selecting the best questions to gather the most accurate assessment of student learning. We will look at the strengths, weaknesses, and best uses of true/false, matching, multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. We will also cover Bloom's Taxonomy, a system for categorizing cognitive functioning, to help in our discussion of student learning classification.

Why Does This Information Matter to Me?

Accurate assessment is beneficial for both teacher and student. As teachers, you will want to know that the knowledge you have worked hard to organize and present is getting across. For students, well-developed exams give them the opportunity to establish their true mastery of the subject matter.