Formative and Summative Automated Assessment with Multiple-Choice Question Banks

Digital automated assessment is a valuable and time-efficienttoolfor educators to provide immediate and objective feedback to learners.Automated assessment, however, puts high demands on the quality ofthe questions, alignment with the intended learning outcomes, andthe quality of the feedback provided to the learners. We here describethe development and use of a large number (N >180)of question banks with multiple items (N & GE;20) that are aligned to the intended learning outcomes of an undergraduategeneral chemistry course. Even though the development of a large numberof high-quality question banks is a formidable task, they allow forflexible and easy-to-implement solutions for formative and summativeassessment once developed. We here discuss three applications of thequestion banks: formative assessment in large online classes, practicetests that provide formative assessment outside classes, and summativeassessment through a digital exam. We highlight the importance ofaligning the question banks with intended learning outcomes, providingadditional feedback to the learners and of quality assurance of thequestion banks, and show how the combined use of the question bankssupports student self-regulated learning. We hope that the presentwork can inspire others to discover the various applications of questionbanks for formative and summative assessment.