Is there a wish within your school to build (new) itembanks for the purpose of digital assessment? If so, we recommend starting by initiating a conversation with the stakeholders within the school or program. By jointly discussing and documenting the points of attention listed below, you will immediately create an action plan.
Tip: Also use existing practices and test blueprints as a basis for the discussion.
Name itembank
- Naming convention: start with the 4-letter code of the school, followed by a descriptive name.
Stakeholders
- Who should have access and with which role (DTO authorizes): teacher, grader?
- Division of tasks between teacher, DTO, and other staff. Are agreements needed? For example, who assembles the exam, who configures which settings, who schedules the exam in a course?
Formative / Summative
- Is it a formative or summative assessment?
- Formative: many question types, difficult topics, extensive feedback
- Summative: pay attention to scoring (due to pass/fail thresholds and analyses)
Assembling the Exam
- Manual (fixed questions) or via a test blueprint (random)? Test blueprint: pay attention to scoring (to ensure the same maximum score)
- Are agreements needed regarding instructions for before, during, and after the exam?
- Are agreements needed for exam settings?
- Possible integrations (Brightspace, plagiarism check, school year, ReadSpeaker)
Item Bank Size
- How many exams do you want to create?
- How many questions does each exam contain?
- For a test blueprint: how many question variants do you want to choose from?
Item Organization
- Important for filtering/selecting items for exams:
- How do you want to organize items?
- Domains, learning objectives/outcomes, and metadata (tags)
Subject-Specific Agreements / Guidelines
- On formulation style
- On metadata usage: for example, creating a structure within learning objectives with subtopics (question type is not needed, as it is a category you can filter by)
Quality Aspects
- Collaboration (using a workflow, labels)
- Incorporate improvements to exam questions?
- Use exam and item analyses
- Consistent language usage
- Naming of items
- Cleaning up the item bank
Regular Alignment
We recommend meeting regularly during the development process to discuss exam-technical and item quality matters.
Consider, for example:
- Uniformity (e.g., formal/informal address, terminology)
- How to handle source references
- The style of question formulation