Examining a Student-Generated Question Activity Using Random Topic Assignment

Abstract

Students and instructors expend significant effort, respectively, preparing to be examined and preparing students for exams. This paper investigates question authoring, where students create practice questions as a preparation activity prior to an exam, in an introductory programming context. The key contribution of this study as compared to previous work is an improvement to the design of the experiment. Students were randomly assigned the topics that their questions should target, removing a selection bias that has been a limitation of earlier work. We conduct a large-scale between-subjects experiment (n = 700) and find that students exhibit superior performance on exam questions that relate to the topics they were assigned when compared to those students preparing questions on other assigned topics.