Writing Effective Questions to Promote Learning

Strategically planned questioning can engage students in learning by helping them reflect on readings, develop problem-solving skills, form concepts, or simply practice foundational skills. Questioning focuses attention and guides study, reading, writing, communication, visualization, design, development, and other learning activities.

The main goal of this Web site is to:

Provide easy-to-follow, quick-to-read guidance for creating questions of varied types: 1-minute essay, short essay, short-answer, check-all-that-apply, matching, along with the traditional multiple-choice and true-false.

The buttons at the left link to ideas that will assist in the development of well-written questions.

Each "question type" section has:

Overview - definition, characteristics, examples, advantages, disadvantages

Construction - how to write the questions

Check yourself - determine whether you can recognize faults in questions