Improve Your Quizzes With These Do's And Don'ts
If you’re like most e-learning professionals, much of what you do revolves around designing and building quizzes. But what goes into creating an effective quiz? Here's a helpful list of do’s-and-don’ts to keep handy whenever you're designing a quiz.
Do
- Let your learners know up-front how many questions there are in the quiz.
- Include questions that are in line with learning objectives.
- Limit distractors (incorrect choices) to one or two per question.
- Design performance-based quizzes that test application of skills and not simply factual recall.
- Create custom quizzes to engage your learners.
- Write quizzes that teach while they test by providing relevant feedback for incorrect answers.
Don't
- Ask questions about content that was not covered in the course.
- Overuse True/False and Multiple-Choice questions.
- Ask negative questions, e.g., "Which one of these should you not do?".
- Include confusing or implausible distractors.
- Incorporate trick questions.
- Shuffle numbered answers; they should be written in numerical order.
There you have it! I hope these do’s and don’ts will be helpful to you the next time you’re creating a quiz. Did we miss any major do’s and don’ts? Feel free to share in the comments section below.
Looking for more helpful resources on quizzing? Be sure to check out these articles:
- Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Effective Multiple Choice Questions
- How to Write Good E-Learning Quiz Questions
- How to Match Question Types with the Skills You’re Testing
- 6 Common Quizzing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and come back to E-learning Heroes often for more great e-learning tips and tricks!
3 Comments
Reasonable list, and I guess as a supplier of Quiz technology it makes sense, however, it almost pre-supposes that quizzes ARE the right way to go. More and more of the clients I speak to are moving away from quizzes towards a more work-based and formalised way of assessing learning, not just testing short-term memory. I agree not covering content not covered in the course, however, if your questioning is about how they would USE their knowledge, then they questions are going to be about how they would USE the knowledge in the workplace, so will need them to do some applied thinking, which will not be immediately obvious and linked to what they have "seen" in the course. I think the biggest "Do" is to have a very detailed and business-focused analysis about whether a quiz is, in fac... Expand