If you're creating your own science course, how do you choose test questions

[Sebastian (a lady)]

So if you were making a science course using a standard high school or college text, where you are devising (or modifying) a syllabus; where do you get test questions for unit tests or a final exam.

 

In particular, I'm thinking about earth science using Tarbuck or something similar, but the question would also apply to biology or chemistry or ... Really anything where you aren't getting a course schedule, assignments and tests as part of the package.

 

Maybe the real question here is how does someone many years distant from her last college science course determine a challenging but fair test that emphasizes the most important information (particularly in fields that have changed a lot).

[lewelma]

Depends on the level of difficulty you are looking for. I would be looking to make sure there were some questions that were easy to answer and some that were hard.

 

Here is some of the places I would look and types of questions I would choose. This is a muddle but might give you some ideas:

 

The questions at the back of Tarbuck (a student should know these answers)

vocab questions

short answer

essay/paragraph

explain or answer questions on a diagram

explain or answer questions on a graph

With Tarbuck, he has a overriding theme of seeing the earth as a system, so he tries to have you apply things you have learned from one chapter to another. I would try to make a question like that.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Ruth in NZ

[regentrude]

I write all my own exams and use different strategies.

You could look online for a college course that uses the text (for instance, Tarbuck), look for an instructor who posts old exams or practice tests on the course website- and then you steal :)

You can also write your own exam using a subset of the end-of chapter questions. Most science texts have a lot of end of chapter problems, too many to work every problem as assigned homework. Give the unused ones for tests (this requires just enough expertise to make sure that the concept has indeed been covered and practiced), or create similar ones by changing numbers and parameters (for physics and chemistry). Or you can modify examples that were worked within the chapter. This is actually a pretty good way, because worked examples ARE about important concepts and should have been studied by the student. (This is only possible, of course, if you either understand the material well enough to solve the problems yourself, or have a solution manual, or can outsource the grading to somebody who does.)

For less quantitative sciences, you can look through the book and design essay questions about important topics that were covered, in order to test retention. (For example, if you see that there was a chapter on the rock cycle, you can ask your student to describe the rock cycle and give three examples for whatever). Many textbooks have qualitative review questions like this at the end of the chapter as well.

Lastly, you can try to find somebody with expertise in the field who would give your kid the exam.