2026-09-02|8 min read
How to write skill-based questions
In short
What makes a question skill-based is not a passage at the top but asking the student to use what they know in a situation they have not met. One check settles whether the context earns its place: delete it and read the question again, and if it can still be answered the context was decoration. The order that works is to name the skill first, then find the situation where it gets used.
A skill-based question asks a student not to recall what they know but to use it in a situation they have not met. As exams have shifted in this direction, question-writing habits have shifted with them.
One side effect: long passages, tables and charts started appearing at the top of questions. But adding context does not by itself make a question skill-based. What follows is where the difference actually sits, and where to start writing.
The difference is in the task, not the context
Put two questions side by side. The first: "What is the unit of pressure?" The second, after three paragraphs about a diver: "What is the unit of pressure?"
The second is longer but measures the same thing. If a student can answer without reading the passage, that passage is decoration. What sets the level is the mental work required, not the word count.
A genuinely skill-based version looks different: work out the pressure the diver meets at a given depth, then compare two depths and decide which dive plan is safe. Remove the passage here and the question cannot be solved, because the passage carries the data.
Testing whether the context earns its place
One check is enough: delete the context and read the question again. If it can still be answered, the context was not needed.
The check is blunt but fast. Decorative context spends part of the exam on reading and penalises slow readers for something other than what the exam measures.
- Does the context carry data, or only set a scene?
- Is every number in the context used? An unused number is noise, not a distractor.
- Can the student find the answer without reading the context?
- Does the context drag the question outside the subject being measured?
Start from the skill, not from the context
The common order is this: find an interesting passage, then invent a question for it. That order produces decorative context, because the passage came first and the question was bolted on.
The order that works runs the other way. Write down in one sentence which skill you want to measure. Then find a situation where that skill gets used in real life. The context comes last and is needed because it is genuinely needed.
An example: the skill is "comparing two ratios to reach a decision". The real situation is the same product sold at two shops in different sizes and prices. The context wrote itself and carries no spare sentence.
A check across three axes
International assessment work describes a question along three separate axes. The same trio makes a useful checklist while writing.
First the skill: what is the student doing? Interpreting data, building a model, judging a result? Second the content area: which topic does it fall under? Third the type of context: is the situation personal, occupational, societal or scientific?
Varying the third axis across a whole exam pays off. If every question is set in a supermarket, the exam has measured a single world.
Questions in this pool carry tags on all three axes, so the spread of skills and contexts is visible while an exam is being assembled.
The most common trap: drifting into another subject
The easiest mistake when writing skill-based questions is turning a maths question into a reading comprehension question. As the passage grows, what the question separates stops being maths and becomes reading speed.
The symptom: students strong in maths miss the question while students strong in language find it. In item analysis this usually shows up as low or negative discrimination.
The fix is to shorten the passage and move the data into a table. A table carries the same information without the reading load.
- Keep the context to two or three sentences
- Put numeric data in a table or chart rather than burying it in prose
- Do not make subject terminology harder than it needs to be
- Write the stem as a single sentence, separate from the context
More than one question from the same context
Building a context takes effort. Rather than spending that effort on one question, drawing two or three from the same passage also uses exam time well.
One condition: the questions must not depend on each other. If a student who gets the first wrong necessarily loses the second, the same mistake is punished twice and two questions collapse into one.
Testing independence is easy: does solving the second question require the answer to the first? If it does, rebuild it.
Frequently asked
- Are skill-based questions the same as PISA questions?
- Not exactly, but they are related. PISA items are the best known examples of skill-based assessment and are recognised for their use of context. Skill-based is the broader term and applies to an ordinary classroom test too.
- Should every question be skill-based?
- No. A student who cannot recall the basic concepts of a topic cannot carry them into a new situation either. An exam needs questions at recall and understanding too, without the weight all sitting at the upper levels.
- How long should the context be?
- Long enough to carry the data and not one sentence more. If there is numeric data, moving it into a table is the fastest way to shorten the text. Length does not raise the level of a question, it only adds reading load.
- Can a multiple choice question measure a skill?
- Yes. If choosing between the options requires using the data in the context, the question measures a skill. What resists the format is asking a student to construct their own solution.