What is an item bank?
An itembank is a collection of items (i.e., questions) for a specific assessment objective. Item banks follow a certain structure, usually based on metadata (for example, creation date, content, author, learning objectives, status, question type, or quality indicators such as p-value and rit-value). By linking this data to items, you can easily filter items when constructing an assessment. This allows you to assemble tests entirely according to your needs.
Any changes made to the items in the item bank are automatically reflected when the items are reused. As a result, the items are always up to date.
Waarom starten met een itembank?
Collaboration
Those who develop together align their goals and processes. The item bank serves as a central repository of items that can be developed, (re)used, maintained, and managed from one location by multiple teachers, subjects, programs, or schools. In this way, exam questions never end up in the drawer of an individual teacher. Moreover, more expertise and time are available per item (exam question) for development and quality control.
Read more here about how to get started with collaboratively building an item bank.
Improving quality
By using the analysis features in ANS, the quality of the items becomes clear over the course of several exam administrations. By removing or adjusting lower-quality items, a higher-quality item bank is created.
Reducing the risk of exam questions leaking
Exam questions may leak, or students may collaborate inappropriately during an exam. Item banks help reduce these risks by allowing each student to receive a unique exam based on a test blueprint.
Using a test blueprint (or test matrix)
With item banks, exams can be constructed based on a test blueprint. A test blueprint helps ensure that an exam is representative of the intended learning outcomes. In addition, it provides a useful way to create multiple comparable versions of an exam, for example for resits or for formative use.
Practicing with digital exams (where students are required to retrieve knowledge from memory) combined with item-level feedback provides students with an effective learning strategy. This gives the student insight into their progress and the learning outcomes or components that still require additional attention. At the same time, it provides the teacher with insight into the areas where students are struggling, enabling them to engage in dialogue with individual students or groups of students and adjust their teaching accordingly.
Investment
Building, maintaining, and managing a high-quality and extensive item bank with different question types and audio and video material requires an upfront investment. Especially for the use of formative assessments that are offered independent of time and place, a certain amount of content is necessary. However, once the investment has been made, reuse becomes easy, ultimately saving time and reducing costs.