Quiz Design Task: Helping Teachers Create Quizzes with Automated Question Generation

Abstract

Question generation (QGen) models are often evaluated with standardized NLG metrics that are based on n-gram overlap. In this paper, we measure whether these metric improvements translate to gains in a practical setting, focusing on the use case of helping teachers automate the generation of reading comprehension quizzes. In our study, teachers building a quiz receive question suggestions, which they can either accept or refuse with a reason. Even though we find that recent progress in QGen leads to a significant increase in question acceptance rates, there is still large room for improvement, with the best model having only 68.4% of its questions accepted by the ten teachers who participated in our study. We then leverage the annotations we collected to analyze standard NLG metrics and find that model performance has reached projected upper-bounds, suggesting new automatic metrics are needed to guide QGen research forward.

How Teachers Can Use Large Language Models and Bloom’s Taxonomy to Create Educational Quizzes

“…However, this work only evaluates questions at the individual question-level rather than at a quiz-level. • The work by Laban et al (2022) moves beyond questionlevel evaluations to a quiz writing task, similar to our work in this paper. The authors design a task where teachers make a quiz exclusively with candidate questions that were automatically generated.…”