Library Skills training online

Online quizzes are a great way to:

• add interactivity to teaching;
• assess baseline or subsequent knowledge;
• provide assessment for learning.

They can be used with either synchronous or asynchronous teaching. This section provides guidance on tools available to us to produce library skills quizzes.

Wondering what quiz tool works best? - see our comparison of LibWizard, Microsoft Forms, Mentimeter and Moodle to help you decide. 

Writing good quiz questions takes time and thought and there is a lot of guidance on how to do this well. The below provides some general principles to follow:

• Ensure questions are clear and concise and avoid complicated or technical jargon.
• When using multiple choice questions make sure that all the options are realistic and reasonable so people can't guess the answer. Also avoid using absolutes like always or never.
• When having multiple questions try not to give away the answer to a question in another question.
• Don't design questions to trick users
• Avoid negative questions or if this are the best way to ask the question make sure that the negatives are highlighted in bold to avoid users misreading the question.
• Avoid having too many choices - the ideal is between 3 and 5 and avoid using all or none of the above as options.
• Avoid anything that may alert the user to the correct answer e.g. having one answer option that is much longer.
• Ensure all options are mutually exclusive.
• Use true and false questions sparingly as students have a 50% chance at guessing - where these are most effective is to test misconceptions. 

See this helpful video from Arena on Designing effective Multiple Choice Questions