How well can teachers estimate the difficulty of a question?
How well can teachers estimate the difficulty of a question?

How well can teachers estimate the difficulty of a question?

Teachers are not very good at writing effective and usable assessment questions. says

Studies typically find that unstructured judgements of the expected proportion who will get a question right typically correlate about 0.2-0.3 with the actual proportions (Bramley & Wilson, 2016; Attali et al, 2014). That means if you estimate the proportion as 0.5, the actual value will probably be somewhere in the range 0.2-0.8.

Left me hugely disappointed. Feels like, or at least looks like, teachers throw out a question hoping to hit a student with the correct answer. Even then, does being right mean, the students know why?

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