Question banks for effective online assessments in introductory science courses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The transition of our large (∼300 student) introductory soil science course to the online setting created several challenges, including engaging first‐ and second‐year students, providing meaningful hands‐on learning activities, and setting up online exams. The objective of this paper is to describe the development and use of question banks for online exams and other forms of assessment in an introductory soil science course. Use of question banks for the development of the online exams, especially in large classes, may be advantageous due to time saving features such as automatic marking of quiz style questions, the ability to easily setup practice exams, and question randomization to reduce the risk of misconduct. Instructors should keep in mind that questions in the question banks should be aligned with course learning outcomes, and organized by theme and level of difficulty. Through a case study of this course, we hope to provide lessons learned which may be applicable to other large introductory science courses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.073 | 0.213 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".