Formative and Summative Automated Assessment with Multiple-Choice Question Banks

Abstract

Digital automated assessment is a valuable and time-efficient tool for educators to provide immediate and objective feedback to learners. Automated assessment, however, puts high demands on the quality of the questions, alignment with the intended learning outcomes, and the quality of the feedback provided to the learners. We here describe the development and use of a large number (N > 180) of question banks with multiple items (N ≥ 20) that are aligned to the intended learning outcomes of an undergraduate general chemistry course. Even though the development of a large number of high-quality question banks is a formidable task, they allow for flexible and easy-to-implement solutions for formative and summative assessment once developed. We here discuss three applications of the question banks: formative assessment in large online classes, practice tests that provide formative assessment outside classes, and summative assessment through a digital exam. We highlight the importance of aligning the question banks with intended learning outcomes, providing additional feedback to the learners and of quality assurance of the question banks, and show how the combined use of the question banks supports student self-regulated learning. We hope that the present work can inspire others to discover the various applications of question banks for formative and summative assessment.