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Four-element in-class scaffolding session preparing students to author high-quality questions

Design · All designs
Evidence · 1 claim (1 mixed) · 1 study (1 design), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

Before the first assessed authoring task, the courses ran a 90-minute session of four elements: a content-neutral quiz teaching MCQ language, a self-diagnosis quiz guiding students toward learning orientation, a question template aligned with operating just beyond current understanding, and a high-quality example question. The article states these sessions were "deliberately designed to help scaffold the process of writing questions of high quality". A final group activity had students collectively author a question to seed the repository.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

  • About 90 minutes of class time; freely available scaffolding materials; a group authoring activity to seed the question database before the assessment task.

Constraints

  • The article links this scaffolding to question quality only as a hypothesis; a controlled contrast with no-scaffolding conditions has not been gathered.

Target Learners

  • first-year undergraduate physics students in large introductory courses

Target Goals

  • writing questions of high cognitive value with clear structure, plausible distractors and articulated solutions

Claims

Examples

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Key Sources

  • Bates, S. P., Galloway, R. K., Riise, J., and Homer, D. (2013). Assessing the quality of a student-generated question repository. https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.2202. doi:10.48550/arxiv.1308.2202
Page metadata
Field Value
type design
id four-element-question-authoring-scaffolding-session
title Four-element in-class scaffolding session preparing students to author high-quality questions
description Before the first assessed authoring task, the courses ran a 90-minute session of four elements: a content-neutral quiz teaching MCQ language, a self-diagnosis quiz guiding students toward learning orientation, a quest...
status review
generated by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-09-26
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — bates-2013

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