hinge-question-designer

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from review. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
# AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2)
name: hinge-question-designer
description: "Design a diagnostic hinge question that reveals whether students understand enough to move on. Use when planning key checkpoints mid-lesson during explicit or direct instruction."
disable-model-invocation: false
user-invocable: true
effort: medium

# EXISTING FIELDS

skill_id: "questioning-discussion/hinge-question-designer"
skill_name: "Hinge Question Designer"
domain: "questioning-discussion"
version: "1.0"
evidence_strength: "strong"
evidence_sources:
  - "Wiliam (2011) — Embedded Formative Assessment: hinge questions as real-time diagnostic tools"
  - "Christodoulou (2017) — Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning"
  - "Black & Wiliam (1998) — Assessment and classroom learning"
  - "Sadler (1989) — Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems"
  - "Haladyna et al. (2002) — A review of multiple-choice item-writing guidelines for classroom assessment"
input_schema:
  required:
    - field: "concept_being_taught"
      type: "string"
      description: "The specific concept or skill the hinge question should diagnose understanding of"
    - field: "student_level"
      type: "string"
      description: "Age/year group"
    - field: "lesson_context"
      type: "string"
      description: "What has been taught so far in this lesson — the hinge question checks whether students understood this before moving on"
  optional:
    - field: "known_misconceptions"
      type: "array"
      description: "Specific misconceptions the teacher wants the distractors to target"
    - field: "student_profiles"
      type: "array"
      description: "From context engine: prior assessment data, common gaps"
    - field: "response_method"
      type: "string"
      description: "How students will respond — e.g. mini-whiteboards, fingers (A/B/C/D), clickers, hands up"
    - field: "time_constraint"
      type: "string"
      description: "Maximum time for students to answer — hinge questions should be answerable in under 2 minutes"
output_schema:
  type: "object"
  fields:
    - field: "hinge_question"
      type: "object"
      description: "The question stem, answer options, and correct answer"
    - field: "diagnostic_key"
      type: "object"
      description: "What each answer choice reveals about student understanding — the misconception each distractor targets"
    - field: "decision_guide"
      type: "string"
      description: "What to do based on class response patterns — when to proceed, re-teach, or differentiate"
    - field: "design_rationale"
      type: "string"
      description: "Why the question and distractors are designed this way"
chains_well_with:
  - "checking-for-understanding-protocol-designer"
  - "explicit-instruction-sequence-builder"
  - "practice-problem-sequence-designer"
  - "retrieval-practice-generator"
teacher_time: "3 minutes"
tags: ["hinge-question", "formative-assessment", "misconceptions", "diagnostic", "checking-understanding"]
---

# Hinge Question Designer

## What This Skill Does

Designs a single, carefully crafted multiple-choice hinge question — a diagnostic question asked at a critical point in a lesson (the "hinge") to determine whether students have understood the key concept well enough for the teacher to move on. Unlike standard multiple-choice questions, every wrong answer in a hinge question is a carefully designed distractor that targets a specific, known misconception — so the teacher can tell not just WHO doesn't understand, but WHAT they don't understand and WHY. The output includes the question, the diagnostic key (what each answer reveals), and a decision guide (what to do based on class response patterns). AI is specifically valuable here because designing effective hinge questions requires simultaneously: identifying the critical concept, predicting the most common misconceptions, crafting distractors that would attract students holding each misconception but NOT st