Types of Questions in Teacher Made Achievement Tests: A Comprehensive Guide

Every teacher, at some point, faces the task of designing a test that genuinely measures what students have learned – not just their ability to guess or write at length. The quality of a teacher-made achievement test depends heavily on one fundamental decision: what type of questions to use. Test items are broadly divided into two major categories – objective type and essay type – and each comes with its own formats, strengths, and limitations. Understanding these distinctions helps teachers construct assessments that are fair, reliable, and aligned with their learning goals.

The two broad categories of test items 🔗

According to the University of Illinois Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning, there are two general categories of test items: objective items, which require students to select the correct response from given alternatives or supply a brief answer, and subjective (essay) items, which allow students to organize and present an original response in their own words. Both categories can be used to measure similar learning outcomes – the key is choosing the format that best fits your instructional purpose.

Objective type items 🔗

Objective type items are structured questions with definite, scorable answers. They remove the influence of examiner bias from scoring because there is a single correct response that anyone – teacher, clerk, or machine – can verify. These items are further divided into two main sub-types: supply type (recall type) and selection type (recognition type).

Supply type (recall type) items 🔗

In supply type items, the student must recall and produce the answer from memory, rather than recognizing it from given options. There are two common formats here.

Simple recall (short answer): Each item is presented as a direct question, a stimulus word, or a specific direction, and the student must supply a brief, specific response. For example: “Who is known as the father of intelligence testing?” (Answer: Alfred Binet). As noted in Vasavi College of Education’s assessment notes, these items measure familiarity with facts naturally and leave no room for guesswork. However, they tend to test factual recall rather than deeper comprehension. When constructing them, the question should be worded so that only one specific, unambiguous answer is possible, and the language should be simple and clear.

Completion type: These are sentences in which key words or phrases have been deliberately omitted, replaced by blanks for the student to fill in. A sentence may have one or two blanks, each carrying a specific point value. Example: “The concept of the structure of mental intellect was proposed by _______.” (Answer: J.P. Guilford). Completion items work particularly well in mathematics and science, where definite answers are expected. A critical construction guideline is to place the blank near the end of the sentence, never at the beginning, so students understand the context before encountering the gap.

Selection type (recognition type) items 🔗

In selection type items, the correct answer is already present among the options – the student must recognize the right one. This category includes several widely used formats.

Multiple choice: According to the University of Illinois CITL, a multiple-choice item consists of a stem – which identifies the question or problem – and a set of response alternatives, only one of which is correct. The incorrect alternatives are called distractors, and their role is crucial: they must be plausible enough to attract students who haven’t mastered the content, yet clearly wrong to those who have. Multiple-choice questions are among the most versatile in educational assessment, capable of measuring everything from simple recall to complex reasoning. Key construction guidelines include: keeping the stem concise and focused on a single idea, making all distractors plausible and similar in length and structure, and avoiding clues embedded in the phrasing. As NC State University’s teaching resources emphasize, each item should assess a specific learning objective, not multiple ideas at once.

True-false (alternate response): These items present a statement that the student must judge as either true or false. They are fast to administer and easy to score, making them efficient for broad content coverage. However, because students have a 50% chance of guessing correctly, their reliability is limited. Good true-false items should be entirely true or entirely false – not partially both. As the Michigan State University Learner Evaluation Handbook advises, avoid absolute qualifiers like “always” or “never,” which tend to signal false answers, and never include double negatives or statements that test two separate ideas at once. True-false items are best used to assess important factual content, not trivial details.

Matching type: Matching items present two columns – a list of premises on the left and a list of responses on the right – and students must correctly pair each premise with its corresponding response. This format is highly efficient for testing associations: terms and definitions, events and dates, causes and effects. A well-constructed matching set should be homogeneous (all items should belong to the same category of content), and the response column should contain more items than the premise column to reduce the effectiveness of elimination guessing. Assessment expert Linda Suskie recommends allowing students to use each option more than once, since a perfect one-to-one match gives test-wise students an unfair strategic advantage.

Essay type items 🔗

Essay type items require students to compose their own responses, in their own words. Unlike objective items, they do not have a single fixed answer – they grant varying degrees of freedom in how a student responds. According to the Encyclopedia.com entry on achievement testing, essay tests must be scored by qualified judges, and scoring reliability depends heavily on the structure of the question and the clarity of the marking criteria. Essay items are most valuable when the learning outcome being assessed involves organizing ideas, demonstrating critical reasoning, or constructing arguments – abilities that objective items cannot capture as effectively. Essay type items are classified into two types: extended response and restricted response.

Extended response type 🔗

In extended response questions, the student is given complete freedom to select, organize, integrate, evaluate, and express ideas in any way they see fit. No restrictions are placed on the form or scope of the answer. A typical example would be: “Describe the defects of the present-day examination system and suggest ways of improving it.” As detailed in Vasavi College of Education’s assessment notes, this type of question is particularly valuable at the levels of synthesis and evaluation – it allows students to demonstrate their ability to recall factual knowledge, evaluate it critically, organize their ideas, and present them in a coherent, logical fashion. The primary disadvantage is the difficulty of scoring objectively: factors such as handwriting quality, verbal fluency, and examiner mood can unintentionally influence marks.

Construction guidelines for extended response items: Questions should be broad enough to allow genuine freedom but clear enough that students understand what is expected. Teachers should prepare a model answer or key points in advance and use it as a scoring benchmark. Enough time must be allotted for students to plan and write a complete response.

Restricted response type 🔗

Restricted response questions give students some freedom to express ideas, but within a defined scope and format. The student is told specifically what context or aspect to address. Example: “Explain the chemical changes that occur in our daily life, in not more than 100 words.” This type of question is most effective for measuring learning outcomes at the comprehension, application, and analysis levels – where some open-ended expression is needed, but a focused answer is expected. Scoring is less subjective than extended response items because the boundaries of an acceptable answer are clearly set. However, restricted response questions are less suitable for assessing broad, integrative abilities.

Construction guidelines for restricted response items: Clearly specify any restrictions – word limits, the number of points to address, or the aspect of the topic to focus on. These constraints should appear within the question itself, not as a separate instruction. The scoring rubric should identify key points that must be present in a full-credit answer.

Comparing objective and essay items: which to choose? 🔗

The choice between objective and essay items is not a matter of one being superior – both serve important functions. Research cited by the University of Illinois has consistently shown that both item types can measure the same content or learning objectives; what differs is how they measure it and what additional skills (such as writing ability) they bring into the equation. Objective items allow wider content sampling in a shorter time and produce more reliable scores, while essay items are indispensable when the goal is to assess a student’s capacity to think, organize, and communicate complex ideas. A well-designed achievement test often includes both.

A useful principle, as highlighted by NC State University’s teaching resource portal, is to begin planning selection-type items as multiple-choice questions and switch to another format – true-false, matching – only when that format serves the objective better. For essay items, the University of Illinois CITL recommends using several shorter restricted-response items rather than one or two lengthy extended-response questions, as this improves both content coverage and scoring reliability.

General guidelines for constructing effective test items 🔗

Regardless of which format a teacher chooses, certain principles apply universally. Every item must be clearly worded so that a student who knows the content can answer it without being confused by the question itself. Items should be aligned directly to stated learning objectives – testing what was taught, not peripheral details. Ambiguous language, grammatical clues, and inadvertent hints must be eliminated. For objective items, options should be parallel in structure and free of unintentional length or complexity cues. For essay items, the scoring criteria must be prepared before administering the test and shared with students where appropriate. As the Encyclopedia.com assessment resource notes, one effective way to improve objectivity in essay scoring is to prepare an ideal answer beforehand and base scoring on how closely student responses align to it.

What do you think? When you design a test, how do you decide which type of question will give you the most accurate picture of what your students actually know? And do you think a single test format – objective or essay – can ever fully capture a student’s understanding of a subject, or does good assessment always require a mix of both?

References

1. https://citl.illinois.edu/improving-your-test-questions
2. https://blog.vasavicollegeofeducation.in/notes/afl/AFL-UNIT-7.pdf
3. https://teaching-resources.delta.ncsu.edu/multiplechoice/
4. https://omerad.msu.edu/images/documents/Learner_Evaluation_Handbook.pdf
5. https://www.smu.edu/-/media/site/provost/assessment/ccresources/multiplechoicetests/suskie-2018-chapter-17.pdf
6. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/achievement-testing