question banking

8/3/2019 Question Banking

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Question Banking

by Madhavi Parchure

Education Technology Unit CDAC Mumbai

Email: [email protected]


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Question BankingMadhavi Parchure

Overview The major ingredient of any objective test is the question. Good quality test has rich setof questions. Rich, in this context, refers to the ability of questions to test the studentscognitive abilities in the most efficient manner. Gathering good questions for a testneeds large amount of time and effort. This can be minimized by having a question bankready, so that constructing a test is as simple as picking up good flowers from a bunch.

What is question banking? A question bank is a collection of questions to support the assessment of studentlearning. Well defined procedures are used to establish and maintain the questionbanks. These constitute the process of question banking.

The primary goal of question banking is ability to deposit, discover and retrievequestions. In order to support discovery and delivery of questions, each question needsto be described with metadata and optional usage data. Metadata is information aboutthe question, and its depth may vary from very detailed to a few keywords only. Theinformation includes revision number of question, mode of insertion etc. Usage data iscontext-specific information about the performance of a question, for example, difficultylevel, discrimination power etc. It can be used to support the quality assurance ofquestions

Why Question Banking? The facilities provided by question banking (as mentioned below) should emphasize itsimportance in education

Provides a well-organized collection of questions. The questions are usuallyorganized into topics. This is explained in detail later.

Provides easy access to questions based on search parameters. Search parametersinclude topic, keywords, or attributes of a question like revision number,difficulty parameter etc.

Minimizes the time and energy required to construct a test. Also, it is possible toconstruct different types of test (generalized to test the ability of students, peekedtests to select students with ability above a pre-determined cut off, entranceexams etc.) in a short time

Facilitates monitoring the performance of question across varying testing criteria.Reuse of a question in different types of test, allows us to analyze the studentsresponses and comment about the difficulty level, usefulness etc of the question

Facilitates monitoring the performance of student over a time period. Thestudents response to test can be checked periodically to monitor his performancein the course. Necessary actions can be taken if the progress is not foundsatisfactory

Provision to update the question based on analysis of students responses to thequestion. Analysis of data gathered in tests can be used to update the question,


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so that the latter revisions of the question are more efficient in judging thecognitive skills of students.

Major features of Question Banking The main features that a question bank is required to support are listed below:

Manage the development of new questions, by providing revision number,original or imported from other systems etc. This information can be a part ofquestion itself, and can be updated with time. Other useful information includesprovision performance of question in tests like the difficulty level, clarity ofquestion, randomization etc.

Have a standard for question, which allows for interoperability of questions. Tomake the questions banking operate at global level (i.e., questions created by anytwo individuals/institutions be shared), international standards defined by IMS

should be adopted for questions. This allows questions to be imported from orexported to other systems directly or by means of a file. Control access to questions. Different users should have different privileges

(access rights) to access question. The privileges may be static (cannot bechanged once assigned) or change over time. This maintains the security of thequestion within a question bank, as opposed to a digital repository where theconstituent questions are accessible to all users.

Enable personalization of assessment. This means ability to construct differenttypes of test by varying the search criteria. For example a cut off test designed toselect students above a particular ability value will include questions withdifficulty level suitable for the target. Whereas a generalized test may includequestions with varying difficulty levels, so as to get the overall view about thestudents ability.

Provide a single point of access to all the information and resources needed toconstruct assessments. Question banking also maintains data related to theperformance of question in earlier tests, students response to the question, etc.This can be used to update the question, vary the search parameters for questionaccess, give feedback to students about their performance and topics in whichimprovement is needed etc

Organization of Question Bank Questions are usually organized in a hierarchy of topics within a question bank. Topics

are arranged in a tree, with the root topic at the top. All other topics are branches of theroot topic. An example is shown below:Std X

PhysicsChemistry Maths Biology

What is atom.... Draw a graph to...

In the above figure, the topics are indicated by boxes and questions by circles. A topicmay contain other sub topics as well. A question may belong to multiple topics. If no


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Moodle enables to store under different topics. The topics can have subtopics. Each

topic can maintain its own pool of question, which can be used to create a quiz. Also, thequestions can be inserted into quiz directly, without being picked from any pool. Thequestions can be uploaded from file, imported and exported across the courses availablein Moodle.

The interface shown below is used for upload/import.


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By upload, we mean that the file is a new one. Importing from a file means that the filespecified is already in use by some other course, and we are reusing it.

The following interface illustrates export of questions in a file named quiz-questions.xml


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The exported file can be used to upload questions in other courses, or can be shared withcolleagues/institutions. This not only allows reuse of a question, but also ensures astandard question format among users.

Question Banking Model IRT Item Response theory makes use of three attributes commonly termed as a, b, cparameters or item parametersThe discrimination parameterThe difficulty parameterThe guessing parameterThe probability that a student with ability , answers a question with parameters a, b, ccorrectly is

)(

1

1)1()P( ba

e

cc

+

+=

The above equation is called Item Characteristic Curve (ICC) since it is characteristicfeature of the question (item).

The guessing parameter c is probability answering the item correctly without anyknowledge of the subject (guessing alone)

Difficulty parameter is a measure of difficulty of the question, and hence is dependenton the ability of the student. The value of difficulty parameter for a question will besmaller for a student with more ability than the student with less ability.

Discrimination parameter shows how useful is the question in measuring the studentskills as compared to other questions in the test. For example, if 75% of students, whoanswered this question correctly, also scored well in exam; then we can say that thequestion has good discrimination power. But, if only 25% of students, who answeredthis question correctly, scored well in exam; then we can say that the discriminationpower of the question is poor.

Applying IRT to build a testResponse to a test by a group of students is the sum of response to individual questionscontained in the test. Depending on the goal of the test determine the Test Characteristic


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Curve (TCC). Select the questions to fit in this TCC i.e., select those questions, the ICCof which will sum up to the TCC. In this case, we are using the item parameters as ameans to refer and retrieve questions from the question bank.

References 1. http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/What_is_assessment_item_banking2. http://edres.org/irt/baker/3. http://www.imsglobal.org/question/

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