Adaptive Assessments

Adaptive Assessments can be really interesting and unique ways for students to navigate questions, but these take a lot of foresight and work to make work. An adaptive assessment can be thought of as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, where one decision affects the next.

What an adaptive assessment does is if a student answers a certain question correctly it gives them a harder question. If they answer incorrectly it gives a slightly easier question for them to attempt.

It is worth mentioning that adaptive assessments only work with multiple choice questions.

1. Planning

Planning is essential to making an Adaptive Assessment work properly. You need to carefully select questions of varied difficulty and organize them accordingly. This can be the most difficult part of making the assessment but it is essential. Once you have your questions organized, your going to start with a middle difficulty question.

2. Sectioning Out the Form

This assessment is going to jump around from question to question. To make this work you need a separate section for each question. For example, if your assessment has four questions you need four section.

3. Adding the First Question

On the first page, you are going to add a question that is multiple choice. Once you have the question and the answers, open the question settings in the lower right corner and select Go To Section Based On Answer.

Your correct solution should go to one section while your incorrect solutions go to a different section. Each correct answer should get progressively harder and incorrect answers get easier. As you get practice with this you can even make questions get harder but then backtrack at times.

4. Branching Question

You now keep adding the questions making correct answers go to one section and incorrect to another. At some point you need to end the form. For this have your correct answer go to Submit Form while the incorrect goes to another section.

You can also have the form go back to the very beginning and have the students repeat the entire form for additional practice if you feel like they need it.

5. Test your form

Test you form. This is a challenging design and you need to test it to make sure your students can navigate to the end. You always want to make sure your students can exit the quiz and that it is not a infinite loop.

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