Christa Roy

EDU 360
Technology Assessment Project 2

For my Technology Assessment 2 project, I decided to develop three Spanish language
translation questions. I did my best to follow Marzanos idea of level 2/3/4 questioning and I
felt that overall, my questions conformed to the levels. Below, I will give my reflection of the
quality of each question, based on student response and the levels of difficulty and
discrimination. Please refer to the corresponding document displaying the results by question
to view the data in the form of tables and graphs.
For my first question, my goal was to choose a Spanish translation that was fairly
common to a general audience. I asked students to translate, Hello. How are you? I chose
this as a level 2 question because I felt that most students have come across this vocabulary at
some point in their lives. It is very basic and I was hoping that most, if not all, would answer it
correctly. The results came back as I had hoped; 100% responded correctly. The difficulty
index result was 1, which means that the question was easy. The difficulty index indicates how
hard the question was to answer and can range from 0 to 1. A 0 indicates the question was
hard to answer; a 1 means it was easy. The goal is to have a difficulty index in the range of .8
on a level 2 question. I dont think I would change this question, although I would not want it
any easier.
I am satisfied with my multiple choice answers as well. Three of the possible answers
were fairly common Spanish questions. The fourth possible answer was an appropriate
response to the phrase needing translation. If students were paying attention this last could be
ruled out immediately. (In my multiple choice answers, there is an error in my typed results:
The first multiple choice answer should read, Hola. Como te llamas? not Hola. Donde esta
el bano? which is m/c answer b.) The discrimination index, which can range from -1 to 1,
resulted in a 0.00 on this question. A 0 indicates that the student responses were somewhat
mixed. All students answered this level 2 question correctly and a discrimination index of 0
simply means that some of the students answered other questions correctly and some
answered other questions incorrectly. Overall, I am pleased with the results of the levels of
difficulty and discrimination for my level 2 question.
Christa Roy
EDU 360
Technology Assessment Project 2

My next question was a level 3 question. To answer this correctly, students would need
to have some prior experience or comprehension of Spanish. I asked them to translate a
sentence that required verb conjugation knowledge: Conjugate to the future tense: They will
speak. Results reported that 50% of the students answered correctly. Using Marzanos level
of questioning, ideally I want my difficulty index to fall between .6 and .8 for a level 3 question.
Results indicated that my difficulty index was a .5. This is a bit lower than the desired range
which means my question may have bordered being a little too difficult. I could possibly
change the question and have students conjugate a verb in the present tense, instead of the
future tense. Maybe more students would have answered correctly, raising the difficulty index
some. I dislike the fact that my level 3 and level 4 questions, as you will see below, both
resulted in a .5 difficulty index. I would like to see a difference in difficulty between the two
questions. Therefore, given a second attempt, I would probably make adjustments here by
slightly simplifying my level 3 question.
I felt the possible answers for my level 3 question were appropriate. Again, students
would need to have some prior education in Spanish to weed through the answers. If they are
familiar with the Spanish subject pronouns, students could narrow the possible answers down
to the two Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes choices for They. Then, the correct future conjugation of
speak or hablar is needed. The discrimination index was higher on this question at .85.
Being much closer to 1 than 0, this means that students that did well on other questions did
well one this one also. As a result, there was more consistency here. I wouldnt change my
multiple choice answers for this level 3 question. I believe the choices were suitable and
offered students the appropriate challenge.
I enjoyed developing my level 4 question. I decided to use a Spanish idiom as the theme
of the question. I asked students to give the English equivalent to Dime con quien andas y te
dire quien eres. Because of the difficulty of this question, I decided to flop the English and
Spanish. I thought it would be too difficult for this particular audience to answer if the multiple
choice answers were in Spanish. Students would have to be proficient in Spanish to answer this
question correctly. Because idioms are not direct translations, I thought this was a good level 4
Christa Roy
EDU 360
Technology Assessment Project 2

question. The students answers came back as I had expected, pretty evenly spread across a
(29%), b (21%), c (29%), and d (21%); d being the correct answer. My multiple choice answers
were all idioms, written in English. I felt they were appropriate for the level 4 translation. The
desired difficulty range for a level 4 question is .4 to .6. I was very pleased to find my result at
.50. Being that the difficulty index ranges from 0 to 1, my result of .5 indicates that the
question was fairly difficult to answer. The discrimination index for this question resulted in a
.85, the same as my level 3 question. Again, being quite close to 1, this number reflects that
most students that did well on other questions also did well on this one.
Overall, I felt my attempt at developing questions based on Marzanos idea of level
2/3/4 questioning was successful. There are not many changes I would make if I had a second
chance at this project. The one area I would consider changing would be in the level 3 question
where the difficulty index resulted in a .50. I would like to simplify the question a bit by making
the verb conjugation a little easier. Maybe asking a present tense translation versus a future
tense. I would like to squeeze into the difficulty range of .6 to .8 for this level question. As a
result, my difficulty index results for level 3 and level 4 question would no longer be the same.
This project was a good experience at testing my abilities in my content area of Spanish. It was
also very beneficial to reflect on my work and absorb the feedback from my peers.