Want to Poke Your Learner's Brain?

Tips to create effective quizzes

Quizzes are an essential part of eLearning courses. Their goal is to evaluate your learners’ progress by providing relevant scoring. In addition, they are not only valuable for your students also valuable for eLearning developers, as these courses enable them to get feedback and make changes to the next eLearning course accordingly.
 

To ensure all of that, you have to be certain that you’ve created a great, all-encompassing quiz which will eventually, help you evaluate your learners’ performance and progress. Let's discuss how to achieve the best outcomes and provide an engaging way of tracking progress of your learners.

Keep it Simple!

When creating a quiz, don’t go overboard with anything. Your quiz should be clear, short and simple. The more concise your questions are, the better. Many developers make the mistake of using over-complicated scientific jargon.

Instead, you have to be aware that your students are not experts yet, and that they are still learning. That is why you should opt for simplicity and include factual questions, as there is only one possible answer to these questions and your learners won’t get confused. Pay special attention on your phrasing, and don’t include anything irrelevant to the content.

Determine Your Goal

Before you even start creating your quiz, you need to have specific objectives in mind. Decide whether it requires simple answers or some more complex ones for better retention. Your questions have to be aligned with the overall goals of your eLearning course.

Try to focus on how the course content can be applied to real life situations. Always stick to the plan of your course, and don’t ask for anything that is outside of the previously determined agenda. Your goal should be to educate, not to confuse your learners by giving them trick questions.

Include Different Question Types

By sticking to one type of questions only, you will miss out on assessment techniques. Instead, go the extra mile and incorporate other question types, as each one of these different techniques has its own unique purpose for both you and the learners.

Be sure to give very clear guidelines if you are using different questioning methods, so that the learners will know what to do, and provide descriptions and comments to make it easier for them. Moreover, avoid unformatted answers, as they will have a negative effect on consistency and processing.

Multiple choice – These questions have proven to be one of the most effective techniques to test your learners’ knowledge. They offer several answers to a question, where only one is correct and the others serve as distractors to draw your learner’s attention from the right choice. When coming up with these answers, don’t just offer too many random possibilities, rather focus on how they are constructed.

True or false – This is probably the easiest way to frame your questions. Although, you have to avoid having too many of them, as they don’t test your learners’ knowledge as well as other types, since they can rely on their luck here, rather than their knowledge.

Fill in the blank – These are also known as completion questions. They are particularly useful when you want to check if the learners know how to use an exact phrase in some context. That is why you should give a sentence with blanks without any hints.

Matching – This type of question is a good idea when you wish to give your learners more time to understand the eLearning course materials. They are formed by providing several phrases with several words where the learner needs to figure out which phrase goes with which word.

Definition questions – They can be formed in two ways – matching definitions (like the above-mentioned matching questions), or offering the definitions with a blank for the learners to fill in. The latter method is better if you are looking for mastery, while the former one is rather easier and should be used when the learners haven’t mastered the course yet.

Open response – They are great when you want to encourage your learners to think creatively about a solution to a certain problem. Since these questions are “open”, you need to be particularly clear about what you are asking them to do here.

Assign Different Difficulties
Assigning different weights to different sets of your questions will contribute to better assessment. For example, when it comes to multiple choice questions, the difficulty can be lower than in other types of questions, such as open response.

Assigning correct difficulty will facilitate the grading process, no matter if you are creating your quiz manually or using online quiz makers.

Include Feedback

Providing feedback on each of the given answers will help you stay focused on the learning objectives and help you deliver some valuable insights. When you are creating your questions, explain each and every answer in a concise way, stating why one option is correct and why the others are not.

Creating a good quiz is a key component for both knowledge retention and assessment. Quizzes serve as a way to help designers improve their strategies, as well as to enable learners to achieve their goals and indicate what they should work on. Follow these tips to make sure you’ve created a quiz that will meet your and your learners’ objectives effectively.