What is a Question Bank and How do I Create One?

A question bank is just that! A bank of questions for a teacher to pull from when creating an assessment within Echo.

For example, a teacher, or a team of teachers, or district staff might create a question bank for a unit or subject containing 500 questions.  Teachers can then use a subset of the questions from that question bank to create smaller assessments throughout the unit. Although creating question banks is time consuming, they can be a real time saver in the long run and can make it easier for teachers to quickly assemble formative assessment tasks.  

Creating a question bank is no different than creating an assessment item in a course. A few things to keep in mind when creating a question bank:

• Assessment banks can be created in separate shared courses that teachers in your domain can access when creating assessments in their course.
• Questions can be associated with any state or course content standards that have been imported into the course. This allows for easier assessment creation and reporting based on specific content standards.
• Warning, once a course links to an question in a question bank, Echo prevents users from editing that question in the question bank. Test banks are typically used by publishers to store high quality, validated questions that once in circulation cannot be changed.

Note: students will not see this question bank nor will they ever interact with it. it is simply a place to store test questions and pull from later when creating other assessments. When creating a question bank, be sure 1) set the access permission to "Teachers only" and 2) uncheck the "This activity is gradable" option.

Articles to visit next:

• How do I create an assessment item?
• How to I use assessment bank questions in my assessment?
• How do I align objectives/standards to an assessment question?