Maarif Model Question Bank

The search for a Maarif question bank has become a priority item on education institutions' agendas with the transition to the Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli, Türkiye's national curriculum model. The need for context- and skills-based questions is growing at every grade level. Yet when you run this query in a search engine, what mostly comes back is printed books sold to individual students. And what the "Maarif-aligned" label on their covers actually rests on is rarely explained.

The picture in the field confirms this gap. An academic study published on DergiPark in December 2025 reports that teachers view the Maarif Model's student-centered structure, which brings out higher-order skills, positively, but that they run into difficulties in classroom practice and in assessment and evaluation processes.

In this article you will find the characteristics of a compliant question according to the MEB (Ministry of National Education) guide, the KB1, KB2 and KB3 conceptual-skill framework, a 7-point selection checklist, and what IndiviTech's pool of more than 500,000 questions, according to the company's own data, offers your institution.

What Is a Maarif Question Bank? How It Differs from a Classic Question Bank

A Maarif question bank is a collection of questions prepared according to the learning outcomes and the skills framework of the Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli (TYMM) curricula. These questions do not merely probe theoretical memorization; they measure the extent to which a student can use the knowledge they have acquired in new and authentic situations.

324 textbooks, 72 teaching materials, and 34 enrichment and support activity books... As of October 2026, these figures listed on the official TYMM portal show how quickly the model is spreading in the field. While teaching materials are being renewed on this scale, it is unthinkable for assessment and evaluation tools to carry on with old habits. Because the Maarif Model is being rolled out on a phased transition timetable, the most reliable way to follow the current list of grades and school levels is directly through tymm.meb.gov.tr.

The Difference Between a Context-Based Question and a Classic Question

A classic question probes whether or not a student remembers a piece of information. Context-based questions, by contrast, ask the student to carry that information over into a real-life scenario. As emphasized in MEB's official announcement, the guide places at its center the measurement of the extent to which students can "apply, transfer and use" the knowledge and skills they have acquired "in new and authentic situations."

A single example from science makes this difference clear. Where the question "What is energy?" probes only the definition, a scenario that asks students to work out which of two refrigerators is more efficient from the annual consumption data on their energy labels measures the ability to use the concept directly. You should not assume that every resource with "next-generation question" printed on it automatically meets this criterion.

The 5 Characteristics of a Question Compliant with the Maarif Model: The Guide's 4 Principles and Design

The foundational document that standardizes this transformation is the "Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli Bağlam Temelli Çoktan Seçmeli Soru Yazım Kılavuzu" (Context-Based Multiple-Choice Question Writing Guide) published by MEB. According to official data, the guide rests on a pilot study conducted with a total of 14,556 students across 12 provinces, 4,361 sixth-graders and 10,195 tenth-graders, and on think-aloud protocols (cognitive interviews). While the principles of the Maarif Model question writing guide directly define the first four items below, the fifth characteristic comes from publication review and design standards.

1. Authentic context: The question rests on an understandable situation drawn from real life. The scenario that has been constructed is not decoration; it is a functional part of solving the question.
2. Knowledge transfer: The student is not expected to repeat memorized information, but to carry it over to the new situation they encounter and use it.
3. Meaningful distractors: The wrong options are not chosen at random; they are constructed so as to detect the student's scientific misconceptions and gaps in learning. In a free-fall question, for example, the distractor "a heavier object falls faster" exposes the misconception immediately.
4. Freedom from unnecessary cognitive load: Long texts, complex tables or extra calculation steps that fall outside the skill being measured are stripped out of the question.
5. Readable visual design: Any graph, table or image in the question stem is presented with the clarity the solution requires.

The IndiviTech publication review team sums up the effect of the design layer on measurement validity clearly:

If the value on the graph needed for the solution cannot be read, the question cannot measure the skill it set out to measure; it is that simple.

KB1, KB2 and KB3: Why Are Questions at Different Skill Levels Necessary?

How a question is constructed matters, but which cognitive level it probes matters just as much in determining an exam's diagnostic power. The conceptual skills in the Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli's skills framework are grouped into three cognitive domains that run from the foundational to the higher-order (tymm.meb.gov.tr):

• Basic skills (KB1): Covers the first-step thinking operations on which the other skills are built.
• Integrated skills (KB2): Includes processes that require more than one basic skill to be used in a coordinated way.
• Higher-order thinking skills (KB3): Represents complex cognitive operations based on evaluating, questioning and producing original solutions.

An exam prepared with a single type of skills-based question cannot show at which stage the student is getting stuck. When questions at the KB1, KB2 and KB3 levels are distributed in a balanced way across an exam, the skill area where the student falls short becomes clear. Questions constructed at different cognitive levels also form the basis of the developmental assessment approach, which aims to raise students' cognitive levels step by step.

Skill Level and Difficulty Level Are Not the Same Thing

A situation frequently encountered in practice is that these two concepts get confused in assessment and evaluation processes. Skill level shows which thinking operation (KB1–KB3) a question requires, while difficulty level (item difficulty) expresses the proportion of students who answer the question correctly. A multi-step KB1 question can be hard; a KB3 question based on a familiar scenario can be solved relatively easily. For this reason a quality question bank must present the two labels separately.

How Do You Choose a Question Bank Compliant with the Maarif Model? A 7-Point Checklist

The "Maarif-aligned" label on a resource is not sufficient evidence on its own.

For textbooks and educational tools submitted for ministry review, the evaluation criteria were raised from 5 to 8. The first six of these criteria cover the content layer (alignment with the curriculum, assessment and evaluation, language), while the last two cover the design layer (visual and electronic content). When choosing a question bank compliant with the Maarif Model for your institution, you can use the following 7-point checklist, derived from the guide's principles and the review criteria:

1. Do the questions contain authentic context? Check whether the real-life scenario that has been constructed is essential to the solution, and whether it has been added purely for decoration.
2. Do the distractors target misconceptions? Examine which gap in learning or scientific misconception each wrong option catches in the student.
3. Is every question matched to a learning outcome? Questions that do not map directly onto the learning outcomes and outcome codes in the current TYMM curriculum cannot prove curriculum alignment.
4. Are the questions labeled by KB1–KB3 skill level? Look for the presence of conceptual-skill labels so that you can establish cognitive balance in exams.
5. Is there variety in difficulty level? Make sure easy, medium and hard questions are distributed in a balanced way so that students at different learning levels can be told apart.
6. Do the subject and grade-level coverage and the volume meet your institution's needs? Verify that the subject- and grade-level question pool is large enough to produce exams and homework all year without falling into repetition.
7. Are digital filtering, reporting and readable design provided? Fast filtering, detailed report cards and reporting, and clear visual design are essential for managing a large question pool efficiently.

Short on time? Run the fastest quality check through the second item: pick a few questions at random and ask which misconception each wrong option was written to measure.

Try the checklist on the IndiviTech pool

Digital or Printed? A Short Comparison for Institutions

For individual study, printed resources meet the need; but at the scale of a school, tutoring center or publisher, a digital question bank is far more efficient for producing exams, screening tests or personalized booklets.

IndiviTech Maarif Question Bank: 500,000+ Questions on a Single Platform

In practice, meeting the criteria on the checklist at institutional scale requires a strong technological infrastructure and a broad content pool.

The IndiviTech Maarif question bank brings together, according to the company's own data, more than 500,000 questions aligned with the Maarif Model on a single digital platform. The questions are structured by subject, grade level, learning outcome and the different skill levels aimed at raising students' cognitive levels. The IndiviTech ecosystem, which also houses solutions such as TamOkul and indiviBook, serves more than 1,000 institutions and more than 100,000 active teachers as of October 2026.

The questions on the platform are prepared with attention to the core principles of the MEB Context-Based Question Writing Guide: authentic context, meaningful distractors that expose misconceptions, and freedom from unnecessary cognitive load. This does not imply any official approval by the ministry. On the contrary, it offers a pedagogical standard that institutions can audit transparently with the 7-point checklist above.

How Are the 7 Items on the Checklist Met at IndiviTech?

Education institutions looking for a digital question bank compliant with the Maarif Model can verify all seven of these criteria in a live environment during the demo process, by examining sample questions from their own subject areas.

Maarif Model Question Pool Use Cases for Teachers, Schools, Tutoring Centers and Publishing Houses

The same Maarif Model question pool turns into workflows specialized to the needs of the different stakeholders in the education ecosystem.

Teachers: Common Written Exams and Developmental Assessment

Preparing common written exams in a way that aligns with the Maarif Model's skills-based, developmental assessment approach is one of the most important expectations in the field. A broad question pool lightens the teacher's load here: the relevant learning outcomes are selected, questions from different cognitive levels and difficulty levels are filtered, and a balanced written exam or worksheet is created in minutes. The analyses produced after the exam then make clear which conceptual skill each student needs support in.

Schools, Private Schools and Tutoring Centers: Screening, Homework and Personalized Books

As of October 2026, exactly 40,223 books have been printed through KÖKSİS (Kişiye Özel Kitap Sistemi, the personalized book system) (Personalized Book). While school and tutoring-center managements manage common screening exams at the zümre (subject department) level and weekly homework booklets from a single center, this system turns assessment results directly into learning material. After the screening exams, AI-assisted assessment and evaluation reports come into play, and personalized question banks are produced for each student that focus only on their own missing learning outcomes.

Publishing Houses: Producing Content Compliant with the Maarif Model

For publishers that have to produce hundreds of original questions aligned with the guide's principles before a new publishing season, time is the most critical cost. IndiviTech's question bank software built for publishers and indiviStudio, its TYMM-aligned content production assistant, digitize authoring teams' context-based question production, typesetting and review processes end to end. Thanks to templates that comply with visual and electronic content standards, the publication preparation process speeds up.

From Label to Evidence: The First Step to Take

The real value of a Maarif question bank comes not only from the number of questions, but from each question having been constructed according to MEB's guide principles and to different skill levels; high scale is what makes it possible to spread that quality across an entire institution.

You can evaluate the resources currently in use at your institution against the 7-point checklist today. Take the next step to close the criteria you fall short on and to test the digital pool of more than 500,000 questions in your own subject area.

Request a free demo for your institution: See live how questions aligned with the Maarif Model can be filtered by subject, school level and skill level. Request a Demo

Are you a publisher? Schedule a content infrastructure conversation for your publisher.