How to Write a Fill-in-the-Blank Exam

Testing a student's comprehension of a subject has been around as long as formal teaching has been used for education. There are many methods of assessing a student's learning. Although essay questions will be the most telling of what they have learned, there are other ways to determine how much a student has learned. Fill-in-the-blank questions do a fair job of getting this information.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Determine the material that the test is to cover and what concepts are most important. A well-defined set of information makes it easier for the student to study for the exam and easier to write the exam.
2. Go through the material and pull out single sentence concepts, principles or facts that the student should know or be aware of. Form these into full sentences.
3. Take each sentence, remove one or more key words from the sentence and replace them with blanks. It is good to mix things up a bit by taking a subset of these questions and list them on the test next to a list of the correct words that will complete the sentences correctly and make these questions a matching kind of fill in the blank question. If you work at it, you can also make the answers true for more than one question so that there are fewer answers than questions.

Tips & Warnings

• Some theories suggest that making the test environment and giving students ways to show what they have learned in a form that they enjoy takes some of the stress of the testing situation away and helps the student perform better.