Creating a high quality set of retrieval questions with ChatGPT
As teachers, we spend a lot of our time asking students questions. Many of these are verbal. (One estimate says that teachers ask, on average, over 400 questions a day!) Targeted questioning is a great way to check students' understanding and adapt a lesson on the fly.
But for some purposes there is still nothing like a well-designed set of written questions. Whether you call it them retrieval questions, a mini plenary, or a quiz, the outcome is the same: Students are all presented with a few key questions that they are expected to consider and answer - whether that is on mini whiteboards, in their books, or on a device.
There are lots of tools out there for creating quizzes for students. But there is more to a great set of retrieval questions than just flinging together a few random questions on a topic. Here are some of the principles that we have built into the first edition of our retrieval question generator.
Context is key.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, the more information you provide ChatGPT (or any other AI tool), the higher the quality of the output is likely to be. You know your class, and your AI helper needs to know a bit about them too, to have any chance of creating a high quality set of questions. The single most useful thing you can do when creating retrieval questions (or any other type of lesson resource) is to provide details of what specific content your students need to know. At the most basic level, it might just be a few sentences that you type in without worrying too much about spelling or punctuation. (See an example below of what ChatGPT can achieve even with messy input!)
You’re in command.
Are the questions above perfect? No. But then, I haven’t given ChatGPT all that much to go on. To me, as a teacher on the AQA GCSE Biology specification, two of these questions jump out at me as particularly high quality. They both make use of specific terms that are essential to my students, in terms of exam technique.
Can you spot which two questions I’m referring to?
Well done if you said 1 and 4. They stand out for me because they are the only ones that make use of command words (‘describe’ and ‘explain’). Understanding and building fluency with command words is a key part of the journey of my students as they move towards their exams, so I try to use them in my retrieval questions wherever possible. (Your needs may vary, so take this thought and apply it to your own context!)
How can I get questions that are more in line with the command words my exam board uses? Well, I just need to ask!
Blooming marvellous.
Experienced teachers (or pedagogy enthusiasts) will be jumping up and down at this point, because despite appearing pretty okay on the surface, this list of questions just doesn’t sit right. In fact, it sends an uneasy shiver up my spine just looking at it, much less imagining presenting these questions to my Year 10 groups.
What’s wrong with the list? Well, I’m a believer in laddering the difficulty of any given set of questions: starting with the easier questions, and increasing the difficulty with each subsequent question. To me, then, the order just isn’t right. (You’ll notice that ChatGPT has mindlessly used each command word in the order I wrote them in my prompt.) Luckily, I can sort this quickly - and without too much additional typing - by referencing a key bit of educational theory called Bloom’s Taxonomy. Many readers will know immediately what I’m talking about, but in case you don’t, let’s check in with ChatGPT for a briefing:
Here is my revised retrieval questions prompt, taking Bloom’s Taxonomy into account.
Time to get specific.
These questions are starting to look pretty good. I could tweak them in 20 seconds or less so that they are perfect for my class. But what if I don’t want to do that? What if I just want to end up with perfect questions in the first place?
Well, this is where you either need to use the paid version of ChatGPT so you can access plugins, or you need to use a different tool entirely. Teaching AI allows you to upload a .pptx, .docx, or .pdf file that you already have, and use it as extra context as our AI generates your lesson resource. (As I said, you can achieve something similar with ChatGPT 4 with plugins, but I quite like being able to set my class context once and then make a few different resources all in one go with Teaching AI.)
Here’s my setup for this, using the Teaching AI lesson planner. Notice that I have uploaded my lesson slides for animal cells.
And here’s the result…
Not only questions, but also answers! You’ll notice that I didn’t have to specify what five parts of a cell should be mentioned in the questions: That’s because my lesson slides already made that clear, saving me the time of typing it out!
You may also notice that the questions all make use of my preferred command words: That’s a personal preference among a couple of our team members that we have set as the default for retrieval questions for the time being,: Within the next couple of months, our Supporters will be able to set up custom command words that are always used for their lesson resources. In the meantime, you can simply use the additional instructions box at the bottom of the lesson planner to request whatever command words you like. For example, you could ask:
Summing up.
I hope this article has given you some useful ideas for using ChatGPT or other AI tools to generate high quality retrieval questions. Just remember the key points above: provide context, specify any command words, consider laddering the difficulty, and be specific about the key knowledge students need. And even with all that, don’t necessarily expect perfection every time: You may need to tweak, edit, or even fully re-write a question or two now and then. AI isn’t perfect - just really useful.
Keep an eye out for the new look version of our Lesson Planner, launching on Friday, June 9th. This will significantly improve the lesson planning experience for everybody, as well as adding 12 new resource types for and one-click download for our Supporters.
Join as a Supporter before Friday to get 25% off your first month’s subscription fees: Just use the code ‘SUPPORTER’ at checkout. You can sign up for Teaching AI for free, or join as a Supporter for just £5.99 a month, at this link.
Supporters get access to 20+ additional lesson resource types, and exclusive access to new features. Basic resource types - like retrieval questions - are available free to all our users, and always will be.
