In this blog, former Teacher and Senior Professional Development Manager at The Assessment Network, James Beadle, shares his expertise on the theory behind constructing good multiple-choice questions.
What are multiple-choice questions and why are they useful?
Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) ask learners to choose the correct answer from a list of options.
They can be an incredibly useful tool in summative and formative assessment contexts as they provide a quick way of assessing learners’ understanding of concepts that otherwise might require a longer, free text response.
If you want to assess, for example, whether students understand the meaning of a particular word you can either:
- Ask them to write down the meaning, which will likely lead to a wide range of varying answers.
- Or you can efficiently ask them to select the correct meaning from a list of possible choices.
As such it’s not surprising that they’re used in a wide range of assessments, from driving theory tests to entrance examinations for US universities.
Constructing good MCQs
The use of MCQs however, does not come without risk. We often see high-profile cases where a poorly constructed multiple-choice question captures media attention and sparks debate about fairness. To illustrate how easily this can happen, consider the following hypothetical example from a reading comprehension task:
Example question:
He wriggled back inside the cave…
What does this tell you about how Joseph got inside the cave? Tick one.
- A) He sprinted quickly inside.
- B) He jumped through the opening.
- C) He had to squeeze in.
- D) He snuck in quietly.
The ‘correct’ answer is intended to be “he had to squeeze in”, but you may think that the answer “he snuck in quietly” was equally valid.
When creating multiple-choice questions, it is essential that the distractors (incorrect options) are clearly wrong (unless the question says something along the lines of “Tick the one that best describes how Joseph got back inside the cave”).
In the context of this question, most people would agree that sprinting or jumping are not synonymous with wriggling.
However, you may question:
- Can you sneak into somewhere by wriggling?
- Why do two of the options contain adverbs, and two do not?
- Should students infer that the two answers with adverbs are both incorrect, given that they add a context not present in the question itself?
This question is likely ‘difficult’ – but is this difficulty desirable? As assessment practitioners, we need to recognise that difficulty comes in many forms, some of which might support our goals for the assessment and associated learning, and others that might undermine it.
If, for example, the last option had instead been “He cycled into the cave”, it is probable that students would have found the item significantly easier, perhaps to the extent that the question no longer discriminated between students of different abilities.
In any exam, as a learner we cannot know what was in the mind of the question writers when this item was written.
However, it’s important before any items are used that they are built with the principles of assessment firmly in mind.
Multiple-choice questions in teaching
Of course, multiple-choice questions don’t just exist within the world of high-stakes summative assessment. During my time in the classroom as a mathematics teacher, I became increasingly aware of just how extremely powerful they can be as formative tools, revealing not only what our students know, but also, just as usefully, what they don’t know.
Consider the following question:
The correct answer is 15 cm2. Importantly, each incorrect answer highlights a possible misconception. An answer of 24 cm2 comes from incorrectly using 8 cm as the height of the triangle. Students giving an answer of 30 cm2 have probably forgotten that a triangle’s area is half of its base multiplied by its height. The answer of 240 cm2 comes from multiplying all the values together, which is instead how the volume of a cuboid is calculated.
With each incorrect answer, the teacher knows the misconception behind it, allowing them to give immediate, powerful feedback to their students. In a summative exam, this question is perhaps best given as an open response item, so that each student’s mathematical workings can be seen and appropriately credited. But in a classroom, the multiple-choice format, if used wisely, allows the teacher to gain the same level of knowledge of students’ understanding as if they’d marked each response individually, yet it can be delivered in a fraction of the time.
To quote Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy, “the shorter the time interval between eliciting the evidence and using it to improve instruction, the bigger the likely impact on learning”. In other words, the quicker we can give feedback to students, the better.
Multiple-choice questions provide an excellent means to achieve this. These can be effectively delivered in the classroom in a wide range of ways: whether it be using an online platform to send the question to each student’s electronic device or simply displaying it on a PowerPoint and having students answer using mini-whiteboards. The key thing is that as a teacher, you can identify misconceptions as quickly as possible and then take immediate steps to correct them.
Develop your MCQs
Whether in the classroom or in a different assessment context, multiple-choice questions can be a powerful tool for assessment. If this is a tool you want to further develop for your own practice, we highly recommend our upcoming workshop series: Writing and evaluating effective multiple-choice questions.
References
Embedding formative assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms, Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy, 2015.