multiple choice questions

multiple choice questions

The Art of Crafting Effective Multiple Choice Questions

1. Introduction to Multiple Choice Questions

As most medical educators who have attempted to read a large number of MCQs in a row can attest, the construction of plausible and effective multiple choice questions is a skill that takes a while to master. However, the ability to craft such items is highly valuable, particularly in an undergraduate curriculum where they may be used to assess a high volume of graded material. The standard “best practice” format for a multiple choice item instructs respondents to “Choose the one best answer.” This type of instruction is sometimes taken to imply that other “incorrect” answer choices carry negligible benefit. As a result, “tricky” questions may unintentionally become measures of the respondent’s test-taking skills rather than their knowledge of the content. Eliminating trick questions, along with the use of frequent exams to provide test practice and lecture reviews to encourage students to critically assess their own learning, can help reduce the incentive to focus excessively on test preparation.

Multiple choice questions are a common way to measure student comprehension in a medical education context. They are an appropriate measure for content that is definably correct or incorrect. Using high-quality multiple choice questions (MCQs) helps ensure assessment of learning. The optimal items for constructing a multiple choice question are those for which there are three to five or more “plausible” distractors. The challenge for item developers lies in creating plausible, high-quality multiple choice questions.

2. Key Components of a Well-Designed Multiple Choice Question

The response selection question is a brief written statement requesting the student choose one of the items presented in a set of alternatives to reply to the question portion of the MCQ. Other response selection formats include left-numbered, right-numbered and multiple response items. The left-number response allows the candidate a choice of answers arranged uppermost at the left side of the exam paper. A right-number response provides the preferred possibility at the right margin. The student can also be given a specific format for filling in a numerical response space. Finally, in the multiple response options given to students, the exam question must ask a question that states exactly how the student is to use the offered options.

The correct answer in an MCQ is one of the alternatives given within the choice set that is the best possible answer to the question. Although other alternatives must be formulated so that they suggest plausible responses and promote consistency with established principles, the question should elicit the correct answer by application of a straightforward deductive reasoning process. The alternatives in an MCQ should include one and only one correct answer that is similar in wording, length, content, and grammar to the other alternatives given in the set. Each alternative should logically form a suggested completion to the exam question. All alternatives must be plausible and devised in such a manner that they are capable of functioning as distractors in the exam.

The question is the actual content of the item. In shorter MCQ, the question may consist of either a short or incomplete statement representing the problem under consideration, an entire connected series of statements requiring a logical connection, or a specific premises difficulty used in arguing the conclusion of the question. In all cases, it is important that the question set the stage for development of specific problem-solving strategies and be usable as an item in a connected passage. When more comprehensive in format, including questions that require a reading passage or other explanatory comments, the MCQ should still be developed around a fairly specific focus.

There are four major components to consider when designing your multiple choice questions: (1) The question itself (2) The correct answer (3) The alternatives (4) The response

3. Strategies for Writing Effective Distractors

Good distractors are relevant examples of how students may respond to an item. Keep your item framework directly in mind as you create the distractors. Try to think of something that is grammatically incorrect and grammatically correct if you are writing an English Language item; if you’re writing a calculus item, denote topics such as limits, derivatives, integrals, and rates of change. If a student selects the distractor, what are they showing to the instructor? What signifies this answer as an error? Small differences in syntax and language can help make an answer feel legitimate while another may seem grammatically incorrect. When writing test items, the primary judgments for the correct answer become more salient, and we lose sight of the incorrect, and that is why students sometimes misinterpret the item’s stimuli.

• Make the distractors more relevant to the item.

Suppose an item has an image as its starting point. Look deeply into the “conversation” that the student can carry on with that image in mind. Then, make each of the options “contribute” to this “conversation”. For example, on a differential calculus question focused on rates of change and the graph of a function, “2” could be the slope of the tangent line at an x-value on the graph. The true antiderivative of a function, and “0” and “1” are there to set the stage for a true solution. They contribute to the conversation.

When you’re writing distractors, think about what students frequently understand incorrectly. What are the enduring misconceptions about a topic? This is very important because the incorrect answers should be plausible, and it helps to understand what students “see” and “hear” in an item’s stimuli. If you keep in mind that actions speak louder than words, it will help to maximize the effectiveness of your distractors.

• Denote common student misconceptions.

4. Best Practices for Administering and Analyzing Multiple Choice Tests

Knowing that a test and item measures goal attainment not only provides feedback as to what test-takers do well and what they need to continue working on, it also provides feedback about the quality of test items. When tests measuring different learning objectives or standards are correlated, questions arise regarding the quality of the items or perhaps the teaching more than one test is measuring the objectives in common. The importance of the test proposed in this article is that it can generalize McLachlan and Jenkins generalizability, while providing more reliable and precise estimates of the multiple facets affecting this type of testing. The errors are defined at the facet level rather than at the hybrid or overall level. The CCG guidelines provide a simple method to determine the variance components. Then these are used to compute standard error.

Student performance scores are the most obvious and often the only test data considered by test developers. However, several strategies can provide useful information about tests that teachers can employ to hold themselves and their students accountable more fully. The most obvious forms of reliability that teachers can and should calculate are the number of correct responses the items and tests generate. For example, if 90 percent of the students miss the item, then it is quite difficult and perhaps the teacher should reconsider using the item or work through it with students. Difficulty can also provide information about the ability of an item to discriminate among students of different levels of performance. Items that are too hard or too easy offer little basis for distinguishing among students, and increasing the range of performance might increase the sensitivity of the item by increasing performance variability.

5. Innovations and Future Trends in Multiple Choice Question Design

Multiple choice questions are a popular method used to assess knowledge, skills, and abilities. This chapter reviews design and analysis issues to consider when creating multiple choice questions. Research studies are often scanned to discover successful multiple choice questions. Test developers might use a generalized multiple choice question verbatim or modified for a specific content area. Unfortunately, the successful use of a multiple choice question in a study does not ensure that the question meets fundamental design and analysis standards necessary to beneficially contribute to the researcher and field. Recent debate has brought forward the need to illuminate current and proposed regulations, including test construction validity in educational processes. In addition to providing guidelines for constructing multiple-choice questions, we note disciplines that benefit from empirical investigation to discover if a question fully measures learning concepts, and if the question is affected by either hypothesized essential and known nuisance variables.

Mobile and web-based technologies can enrich multiple choice test items. Traditional multiple choice tests have obvious limitations when assessing affective and psychomotor learning objectives. New technologies allow us to create extensions to the traditional items, making it possible to assess complex learning objectives in addition to the traditional cognitive domain. Specifically, three new item types are described in terms of rationale, available technology, item construction and evaluation, and potential advantages and disadvantages. Despite the potential advantages of such items, we caution that we need to guard against making assessments unwieldy. It is often most efficient to use direct methods to assess affective and psychomotor learning objectives.