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Educational Measurement and Evaluation

Notes

A question bank can store as many questions as possible so that generation of randomised
tests is done without any difficulty. Question banking thus provides substantial savings
of time and energy over conventional test development.

24.4 Question Bank in Action

A particular school wants to use a computerised question bank to generate its question paper for
the term-end exam. It also wishes to have all types of questions in the paper. It wants to have a
mix of essay type questions, short answers type questions and objective type questions in the
question paper. Three sections are therefore incorporated in the paper each with two questions.
Also, the Principal is very conscious of the educational objectives. How would they go about it ?
A teacher who is a computer enthusiast has suggested the following method. The procedure for
establishment of such a system requires a few steps such as preparing computerised question
banks, doing test and item analysis while keeping taxonomy of educational objectives in mind
and lastly, devising methods to construct various sets of question paper by simulation techniques
using Random number generators. We hereby briefly discuss them.

Question banks also helps in providing a platform for discussing curriculum goals
and objectives. The items put in the question banks can be made to inherit properties
like common mistakes made by the students, their capabilities and incapabilities
etc. This provides a way to discuss possible learning hierarchies and ways to better
structure curriculum.

Taxonomy of educational objectives
A number of educators have divided the learning outcome into three non-overlapping domains
– cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Theses efforts were mainly done because of finding some
kind of relevant test items. We will concentrate on the first two domains.

DOMAINS

Cognitive (Bloom, 1956) Affective (Krathwohle, 1964)
Knowledge Remembering of Interest Level of involvement
Information receiving

Comprehension Relating of concepts values Responding valuing
Analysis gathering and attitudes organisation
Arranging facts
Evaluation Judgement using Characterisation by
Criteria remembered value

Cognitive and affective domains
The cognitive taxonomy, has received the most attention from test constructors because it has
been able to define the intellectual level at which instructional objectives and test items are
written. So while making computerised question banks efforts would have to be done to translate

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