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Overview of Section Headings

Section Headings serve several purposes: They can be used to differentiate among various sections of a quiz. They can be used to provide specific directions for a particular question set. They can be used to place a piece of text such as an story or problem scenario that pertains to a series of questions. Section Headings can be used to insert an image or animation above a question or series of questions. Finally, section headings can also be used to create random versions of a quiz. Each of these uses is described in brief here.

Using Section Headings to Differentiate Among Quiz Sections

When creating a quiz, course editors have the option of breaking the quiz into specific sections based on either question type or subject. For example, an instructor has a 20 question quiz consisting of five true-false questions, five multiple choice questions, five short answer questions, and five essay questions. She can create a section heading for each of these question types in effect breaking each question type into its own section of the quiz. The benefit of doing this is that her students will have a visual construct of how the quiz is broken down thus knowing where to spend the most time.

Using Section Headings to Provide Specific Directions

Continuing on with the above scenario, the instructor can use the text area of the section heading to insert inform the students what they can expect in the following question set. For example the instructor may include this text for the true-false questions,

"This section contains five statements. You are to decide whether each statement is factually correct and thus true or factually inaccurate, thus false. Each response is worth 1 point."

Using Section Headings to Place a Piece of Text Above a Series of Questions

Section Headings can be used to place a piece of text such as an story or problem scenario that pertains to a series of questions. To continue on with our example, the instructor could use the section header before the multiple choice questions to include the following:

"This section is preceded by a brief paragraph that describes a scenario where this is a personality conflict in the workplace. Carefully read the scenario. Then read the question and decide which response is the most appropriate course of action. There are five questions worth 2 point each.

"Jack and Jill were asked to share an office..."

Using Section Headings to Insert an Image or Animation

In addition to inserting text into a section heading, the instructor could also insert an image or brief animation to illustrate a concept and then ask the students to respond to it. For example the instructor could insert this image into the quiz along with the following instructions:

"The following image is of a workplace disagreement. Interpret the body language of each of the participants and use that interpretation to answer the five questions below. Each question is worth five points."

Image courtesy of Google Images

Using Section Headings to Create Random Versions of a Quiz

Finally, section headings allow you to display a random subset of questions (from a larger bank of question) for each copy of the quiz presented to a student. For example, the above quiz may actually contain 15 essay questions however the instructor wants her students to answer only five that are randomly selected from the entire pool. She can do this by utilizing the Max Items option in the section heading editor. In fact, she could do this for each section if she had enough questions.

Additional Resources
From the ANGEL Help & Information Guide:
Add A Section Heading To A Quiz
Using Section Headings To Create Random Versions Of A Quiz

From the Learning Design Community Hub
Writing Effective Questions To Promote Learning

From the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence:
Writing Effective Questions To Promote Learning