Explore the Item Pools features and how to set up an assignment to use Item Pools.
Item Pools allow you to create an assignment that randomly selects items to display to each student. You can specify the number of items to sample from and set specific sampling requirements, or you can choose to have a random number of items displayed to the student.
In the Settings for an Atomic Assessment, select the Random Question Selection section to see the Item Pooling settings.
Figure 1: Setting Up Item Pools
Random selection
The random selection option is available in any assignment. You can specify a number under the Number of items to randomly select field and the assignment will randomly pull n items out of the total number of available items in the assignment. The assignment will be randomized to each student.
Sample based on tags
Sampling based on tags is only available for items that have tags in an assignment. This option can be used to create an assessment where students are tested on several topics but you want them to see a varied amount of questions for each topic.
Example Use Case:
Figure 2: Example Sampling Based on Tags
Each item in this assignment has two tags: a topic and a difficulty level. Sampling can be chosen using either category, but this example shows questions sampled by topics.
This assignment will show each student 10 questions, 3 from Algebraic Concepts, 2 from Data Analysis/Probability/Statistics, 2 from Measurement/Geometry, and 3 from Numbers and Operations on Numbers.
The Easy, Medium, and Hard tags will be ignored when choosing questions to show students. If there are any questions that have an Easy, Medium, or Hard tag but no topic tag, they would be included in the assignment.
How to configure the assignment
- Create all of the material you want to test on and add those to your assignment. The assignment will act as your item pool, so add all of the items to the assignment that you want to test on.
- Add tags to your items based on the specific groupings you want to sample for. If you don't have tags created and added already, you can learn how to create and apply tags here.
- Once you have applied tags to the related Items, go to the Assignment Settings, scroll down to the Item Pool section, and check the box Sample based on tags.
- All of the tags in your assignment will display so that you can set sampling requirements, including:
- Don’t include items with this tag: Items will not be included in the assignment
- 1+: A random selection of the specified number of items will be included in the assignment
- Don’t sample based on this tag: Items will not be sampled. Instead, all items with this tag will be included in the assignment.
Note: Don’t sample based on this tag will include all items with the tag unless you have other tags attached to the item that are excluded in other ways. For example, I have an Item tagged with both Tag 1 and Tag 2. I set my Tag 1 settings to randomly select 1 and my Tag 2 settings to 'don't sample'. The student may not see the Item because of the Tag 1 setting.