Our lesson planning should include planning for some high quality questions; good questions help us know more about our students’ learning and help us to address misconceptions.
An outstanding new resource to help us do just that is Craig Barton’s and Simon Woodhead’s Diagnostic Questions site. The site has over 2500 multiple choice questions with carefully designed responses to address common misconceptions.
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The questions are very clearly categorized, there are numerous sub-categories under the main headings of Number, Algebra, Shape, Space and Measure, Data and Statistics and Post 16 – Pure.
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You can just use the site online but registering is highly recommended as you can then create your own quizzes and save them for later use. I found that using the Instant Quiz facility provides a very easy way to do do that as it is possible to add any question to the Instant Quiz. Suppose we wish to create a quiz on 
Algebra – Expanding Single Brackets; head for the questions and select Algebra – Expanding Single Brackets. The questions will then be displayed and you will see as you hover over any question you have the option to select + which will add that question to the Instant Quiz.
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Once you have selected your questions select Quizzes and then the Instant Quiz, you will find that you can select all the questions and add them to a new quiz. 
Once you are satisfied that your new quiz is saved you can delete all the questions in the Instant Quiz and you are ready to go for the next quiz you wish to create!
Teachers everywhere – this is a chance to collaborate – it is easy to upload your own questions – so far I have found the PowerPoint route the easiest way to go – here’s one I created earlier!
I think we all owe a huge thank you to Craig and Simon for making this happen – I really look forward to seeing how this develops.
Update – download your quizzes.
I am pleased to say that the Rich Questions post is one of the most popular on this blog – so the Diagnostic Questions site has been added there. There also seems to be a great deal of interest in the 5 Minute Lesson Plan which quite rightly includes planning for questions.
Last word to Einstein: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
See also: Diagnostic Questions Revisited and Diagnostic Questions by Year 7