Creating Effective Fill-in-the-Blank Questions

Teachers are faced with writing objective tests and quizzes throughout the year. The main types of objective questions that teachers typically choose to include are multiple choice, matching, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank. Most teachers attempt to get a mix of these types of questions in order to best cover the objectives that were part of the lesson plan.

Fill-in-the-blank questions are a common type of question due to their ease of creation and usefulness in classes across the curriculum. They are considered an objective question because there is only one possible answer that is correct.

Questions Stems:

• who (is, was)
• what (is)
• when (did)
• where (did)

These stems are typically used to measure a wide variety of relatively simple skills and specific knowledge. These include the:

• Knowledge of terms
• Knowledge of principles, methods, or procedures
• Knowledge of specific facts
• Simple interpretation of data

There are a number of advantages to fill-in-the-blank questions. They provide an excellent means for measuring specific knowledge, they reduce guessing by the students, and they force the student to supply the answer. In other words, teachers can get a real feel for what their students actually know.

These questions work well across a variety of classes. Following are a few examples:

• Math teachers use these questions when they want the student to provide the answer without showing their work. Example: -12 ⁷ = _____.
• Science and Social Studies teachers can use these questions to easily assess whether students have learned basic concepts. Example: The atomic number of Oxygen is _____.
• Language Arts teachers can use these questions to identify quotes, characters, and other basic concepts. Example: I am the Canterbury Tales pilgrim who was married five times. _____.
• Foreign language teachers find these types of questions useful because they allow the teacher to judge not only the student's understanding of a particular word but also how it should be written. Example: J'ai _____ (hungry).

Constructing Excellent Fill-In-The-Blank Questions

Fill-in-the-blank questions seem quite easy to create. With these types of questions, you do not have to come up with answer choices as you do for multiple choice questions. However, even though they appear to be easy, realize that there are a number of issues that might arise when creating these types of questions. Following are some tips and suggestions that you can use as you write these questions for your class assessments.

1. Only use fill-in-the-blank questions for testing major points, not specific details.
2. Indicate the units and degree of precision expected. For example, on a math question whose answer is a number of decimal places, make sure that you say how many decimal places you want the student to include.
3. Omit only keywords.
4. Avoid too many blanks in one item. It is best to only have one or two blanks for students to fill in per question.
5. When possible, put blanks near the end of the item.
6. Do not provide clues by adjusting the length of the blank or the number of blanks.

When you have finished constructing the assessment, be sure to take the assessment yourself. That will help you be certain that each question has only one possible answer. This is a common mistake that often leads to extra work on your part.

Limitations of Fill-In-The-Blank Questions

There are a number of limitations that teachers should understand when using fill-in-the-blank questions:

• They are poor for measuring complex learning tasks. Instead, they are typically used for general knowledge questions on the lowest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.
• They must be written very specifically and carefully (as with all items).
• A word bank can provide accurate information just as well as an assessment without a word bank.
• Students who are poor spellers might experience problems. It is important for you to decide if that spelling is going to count against the student and if so for how many points.

Student Strategies for Answering Fill-in-the-Blank

• Do not answer a question until you have read it all the way through.
• Always do the easiest and most obvious questions first.
• Pay attention to the language of the question (verb tense) as a clue
• Pay attention to a word bank (if one is provided) and use the process of elimination
• Read through after each answer to make sure it sounds right.