After students have taken a Blackboard test, you may use the Item Analysis tool to view statistics such as Discrimination, Difficulty, and Standard Deviation that may help you to identify questions that could be improved.
Control Panel
1. Access your course’s Control Panel and click on Course Tools to expand this part of the menu.
Tests, Surveys and Pools
2. From the Course Tools menu choose Tests, Surveys and Pools.
Tests
3. Click on Tests.
Action button
4. Hover your mouse pointer over a test and click on the action button that appears beside it.
Item Analysis
5. Choose Item Analysis from the menu.
Select test
6. Select the test from the drop down menu and click on Run.
Available Analysis
7. After a short wait you will be notified that the analysis has been produced and you may view it by clicking on the link under the Available Analysis heading.
Details
8. The first section provides a summary of how many questions there were, attempts made, and the average score.
9. Following this is a breakdown of the Discrimination and Difficulty of the questions. This is described in the Blackboard manual as follows:
Discrimination: This area shows the number of questions that fall into the Good (greater than 0.3), Fair (between 0.1 and 0.3), and Poor (less than 0.1) categories. A discrimination value is listed as Cannot Calculate when the question’s difficulty is 100% or when all students receive the same score on a question. Questions with discrimination values in the Good and Fair categories are better at differentiating between students with higher and lower levels of knowledge. Questions in the Poor category are recommended for review.
Difficulty: This area shows the number of questions that fall into the Easy (greater than 80%), Medium (between 30% and 80%) and Hard (less than 30%) categories. Difficulty is the percentage of students who answered the question correctly. Questions in the Easy or Hard categories are recommended for review and are indicated with a red circle.
10. Following this is a breakdown of this information on a per question basis.