Common Questions You Can Answer with Canvas Learning Analytics
7. Do my quiz questions measure student learning?
For each question in a quiz, Canvas computes a Discrimination Index. This statistic is supposed to indicate if this question is a strong measure of student knowledge. To see this data, go to Quizzes and click on the specific quiz link. In the upper right corner select Quiz Statistics.
The Question Breakdown on the Quiz Statistics page will display the Discrimination Index data.
A question with a high discrimination index (marked as green) means that students who do well on the quiz generally get it right, and students who do poorly generally get it wrong.
A low discrimination index is anything lower than 0.24 (marked as red). It means that students who do well answered this question incorrectly, and students who do poorly answered this question correctly. A low discrimination index could mean that the wording of the question or answer options might be unclear or that students do not understand a particular concept. It’s up to the instructor to try and avoid these types of response patterns in assessments, and to figure out what causes them to occur.
For a question that indicates a low discrimination index, it is highly recommended to revise the question even if the majority of students answered the question correctly.
