Editor: Viv Edwards (University of Reading, UK)
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Volume: 11 Number: 3 Page: 147–162
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Why Some Questions Don't Work: Evaluating Examination Prompts in an Educational Setting
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Desmond Allison and Anthea Fraser Gupta
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This report seeks to illuminate some of the possibilities and pitfalls of question design for examinations, and refers to a particular academic setting as an illustrative case study. The paper presents
a narrative account of a staff workshop in which the presenters drew on writing prompts that an examiner judged to have worked or not worked in practice. Our account retraces the stages of the workshop.
We invite readers to formulate reactions to three examination prompts before we reveal which one of the three proved to be `a dismal failure' in the experience of the examiner. The comments of participating
colleagues, and our own observations as workshop designers, will also be reported. Our closing discussion relates the issues that arose to guidelines proposed in the language assessment literature for the
design of essay writing and text response prompts.
© Multilingual Matters
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