Page 281 - DEDU504_EDUCATIONAL_MEASUREMENT_AND_EVALUATION_ENGLISH

Unit 24 : Question Bank

question bank. One should be prepared to answer technical questions that might arise. Computer Notes
expertise is an essential requirement. One should be capable of modifying computer programs,
establishing a database system, and capable of running packaged programs. For planning a
question bank, evaluation pattern of the program has to be specified e.g. details about courses
and their contents, objectives of assessment, weightage of internal and external assessment,
conflation and reporting procedure. Course-wise blue-print for the term-end examination has to
be defined on primarily three dimensions viz. question types, content Blocks/Units and learner
abilities. Preparations of question banks for courses of an educational program requires a lot of
cooperative efforts. Expertise has to be tapped from all the available sources (from within and
outside the university) and pooled together. Writers and reviewers of questions for the bank
should have, besides their expertise in the subject content and teaching experience, sufficient
grounding in evaluation methodology. Even persons selected to act as paper setters, moderators
or evaluators should have, not only prescribed experience of teaching the subject, but also adequate
background of modern evaluation methods. Having identified such personnel, subject/course-
wise question bank task groups may be formulated. Every task group will be guided/headed by
one faculty from the school and consist of 4-6 persons selected from among course-writers,
teacher counsellors and experienced item-writers available from other institutions.

24.3 Item Review

Review, editing and revalidation of items/questions submitted by the item-writers should be
done in presence of item writers under the guidance of content and evaluation specialists. Generally
the target of number of questions/items per course at the optimum level is taken as 10 times the
total number of questions/items to be taken in the question paper. There is no upper limit to
question bank size. Each question or item to be deposited in QB for a particular course must be
well characterised in terms of the following aspects :
• The Block/Section/Chapter and unit number of the book
• Type of item and sub-type falls under it
• Estimated level of difficulty from the point of view of average learner
• Maximum marks it should carry
• Time (in Minutes) required for answers

• The synoptic points of answer and marking scheme for supply type questions and ‘key’
answers for selection type questions, and
• The level of educational objectives it is intended to possibly test (in the Taxonomy hierarchy)
Item-writer should indicate on an item-sheet, all the points which would be finalised in the
editing process. Questions/items available for different courses should essentially pass through
the revalidation process particularly content and evaluation-edition at the time of their being
used for paper setting. Post-validation of questions/items used in evaluation involves determining
the descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, marks distribution, standard error of
measurement of marks secured by the students (population/sample) in the examination of each
course and item analysis (you will read it in detail in next section). Item analysis is the statistical
study of the performance in each question by the student group as against the performance in
question paper as a whole. This is a necessary feedback for the future improvement of the
question bank. This can be achieved with the help of a computer and using standard method of
analysis.
Descriptive statistics from the test analysis is extremely useful in making decisions such as pass/
fail, grace marks for borderline cases, grading and so on. The results of item analysis are essentially
important for improvement of question banks, for deciding on the reuse of ‘good’ questions for
future examination and improvement or rejection of poorly functioning questions.

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