Page 286 - DEDU504_EDUCATIONAL_MEASUREMENT_AND_EVALUATION_ENGLISH

Educational Measurement and Evaluation

Notes 24.7 Summary

• Question banks are large database of suitable questions that are coded by subject area,
instructional level, instructional objectives measured, and various other pertinent question
characteristics (e.g. difficulty level and discriminating powers). Questions in the question
banks are often called ‘items’.
• Planning for a question bank involves defining processes for preparation of individuals,
preparatory work for the question bank and identifying what has to be established with the
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.
• 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. 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
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Computerised question banks
• One essential activity for the “On demand” examination system is the preparation of question
banks. For this, let us try to relate the type of questions with the educational objectives.

• Using simulation and random number generators
• Parallel sets can be made very easily with the help of random number generators. Arithmetic
methods, particularly suited for computer operation are available for generating random
numbers. The most common method is with the help of Linear Congruence Generator.
Z = ( Za i – 1 + ) c mod m, a,c,m,Z are + ve integers and a,c,Z ≤ xm
1
0
0

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