Creating and Managing Assessment Questions in Large Courses

A Faculty of Arts & Science Teaching and Learning Community of Practice

Cultivating a Questioning Mind: Student Led Question Composition in Large Courses
Naomi Levy-Strumpf, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Human Biology
Maria Papaconstantinou, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Human Biology

To facilitate critical thinking and mastery of foundational concepts in a large Genetics course (~1000 students), we decided to actively engage students in question creation. We used “Quizzical” an online platform developed by Prof. Dan Riggs. Via this platform, students are tasked with the creation of multiple-choice questions. To foster metacognition and encourage a shift from perceiving learning as memorization, students were encouraged to create application-based questions. Higher grades were granted to question that creatively integrated multiple concepts or required knowledge application. The success of incorporating Quizzical as an integral assessment in this course prompted us to further develop the platform to facilitating broad-base use across disciplines. We will discuss the learning outcomes achieved by engaging the students in question creation, as well as the added features in the latest Quizzical 5.0 version.

Building and Maintaining an Equitable Question Bank for Online Tests
Jeremy Webb, Assistant Professor, Astronomy and Astrophysics

When administering an online test for large classes, drawing questions from a large question bank can be preferrable to releasing an identical set of questions to each student to minimize academic integrity violations. However, with each student receiving a different set of questions, it is difficult to ensure that each test has the same difficulty and covers the same topics. I will discuss the lessons I have learned after teaching two large breadth requirement courses online over the past three years and outline my current method for maintaining an equitable question bank for my courses.

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The Faculty of Arts & Science Teaching & Learning Community of Practice (CoP) was established in 2015 to create a collegial forum for faculty and instructors to meet and share teaching practices and strategies across fields and disciplines. This CoP is coordinated by Andrew Dicks (Professor, Teaching Stream and Associate Chair, Undergraduate, Department of Chemistry).