Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ It’s a question of order

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This short article references a 2022 paper that studies how the order of questions in a test impacts how well the test-takers do. "A perfectly logical test-taker should do equally well no matter the order of questions," writes the author, "but research shows that humans are influenced by the order." In particular, "students answered more... questions (correctly) when they began with easy questions compared to when they started with difficult ones." The relevant question to ask here is this: if the result depends so much on the order of the questions, what is it exactly that the test is measuring?

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 30, 2024 4:15 p.m.

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