The Scoring of Matching Questions Tests: A Closer Look (original) (raw)

Electronic testing has become a regular part of online courses. Most learning management systems offer a wide range of tools that can be used in electronic tests. With respect to time demands, the most efficient tools are those that allow automatic assessment. The presented paper focuses on one of these tools: matching questions in which one question can be paired with multiple response terms. The aim of the paper is to identify how the types of questions used in a test can affect student results on such tests expressed as test scores. The authors focus mainly on the issue of the possible increase in scores that can occur with the use of closed questions, when students, after selecting the answers to the questions they know the correct answers to, then guess the answers to the remaining questions (see Diamond and Evans, 1973, Ebel and Frisbie, 1986, Albanese, 1986). The authors show how the number of distractors (unused answers) included in a question influences the overall test sco...