You’ve spent weeks developing an amazing course and now it is time to create the assessments. Nothing kills an award-winning course like a poorly developed assessment.
There is more to creating a good assessment than pulling the main points from the course content and turning them into multiple choice questions. Unfortunately, many of us do not leave ourselves the time to thoroughly craft assessments, don’t involve the SMEs like we did with the content creation, and just plain don’t know how to create strong assessments.
A good assessment should not only check the learners’ knowledge of the content, it should also test the learners’ ability to apply the content into real life. This means scenario-based questions. This means involving the SMEs to create realistic scenarios. This means leaving enough time!
Another thing that a good assessment does is to identify when learners are weak in a topic area. If learners incorrectly answer several questions within a related topic, then provide feedback on the area within the course where they can review the topic content or to a location outside of the course where they can receive additional help on the topic.
Periodically run a report to see what questions and topics people are struggling with. If learners consistently miss a question, it is a good indication that either the question is flawed or the content within the course needs work.
Julie Delazyn at Questionmark created a great inforgraphic on 10 Actionable Steps for Building a Valid Assessment.