A picture is worth a thousand words: Educator guidelines for testing with photos

Abstract

In business schools, photographic images are widely used in teaching material but not in testing. To enhance student preparation for business decision making, it is desirable to provide real-world context with photos not only for learning but also for assessment. In this teaching brief, we share our experiences with teaching warehousing knowledge for supply chain management and logistics concepts effectively using multimedia testing with photos. Using a modified Bloom's taxonomy as a framework and defining a question structure, we discuss photo-question examples from actual exams. We provide educator guidelines for photo sources, technical improvements, assessment features, and question clarity. We detail student perspectives and their overwhelming support for photo assessments over text-only assessments. We present the challenges and advantages of the method for the instructor and research opportunities.