ITSpotlight is designed to keep the campus up to date on ITS activities and services.
Summertime is Pool Time!
Posted June 14, 2023
by IDLT
Blackboard Offers Testing Pool Options to Increase your Online Test Integrity
Summer can be an opportunity to revamp assessments for courses, but no matter what time of year you dedicate to reviewing your assessment strategy, objective tests and test integrity are always in need of our attention.
Tests containing objective questions can concern faculty because students can more easily share answers. It is often best to assume that your students will approach online asynchronous and synchronous tests as an open-book, group test. Writing the questions under this assumption means your questions tend to have higher complexity, but that doesn’t eliminate the concern about whether you are assessing each student’s mastery of the content or a group’s ability to answer the questions by working together. One of Blackboard's integrated features can help!
One way to help focus student access to resources in this testing format is to create pools of test questions. If you have old exams or access to exams from other faculty who have taught the course, review all those questions, categorize and group them by topics and difficulty levels, and create pools of questions. If you have not used the Item Analysis Feature in Blackboard after your students complete an online exam, that might help you in your review of previous test questions.
In Blackboard, you can then create tests that are made of randomized blocks of questions. This will keep students from having the same 30, 40, or 50 questions as their classmates and still evenly assess across the content and among student testing experiences. As time goes on, you can continue to edit some of the questions or add new ones and remove others from those pools, but doing the heavy lift of setting up these pools in a course that relies on objective testing can help you manage your test integrity over the long term with less annual maintenance.
You may need to pull individual test questions from other semesters into a course shell to build your pools. Blackboard allows for individual export of tests and pools that can then be imported to another shell. You can also consider using Question Sets to pull specific questions from one test to another test in their own group, but Questions Sets and Random Blocks have specific sets of functions and features. Review this article to determine which will best serve your assessment strategy: The Difference Between Random Blocks and Question Sets.
Dive into assessment this summer and remember that the instructional designers in ITS-IDLT are available for consult when you need a hand!
