Skip to main content

Writing good multiple choice questions

Multi-choice seems to have come back into fashion somewhat in the UK. I gather it has long been used extensively in the USA as a means of practising and assessing skills and knowledge. Writing good multi-choice tasks is an interesting challenge and I was happy to learn something about it a few years ago when I wrote some assessment tasks for Asset Languages in Cambridge.

Firstly, three options are, it seems, as statistically adequate as four, although you often see four choices given on exam papers.

Secondly, it is important that all options be "in play". That is, they must be reasonably tempting to the learner.

Thirdly, a good multi-choice question should have the aim of allowing about 70% or 80% of learners to get the answer right. A good balance of outcomes would be around 70% get the right option, with the other two options getting about 15% each. A question which attracts equal responses for each option is a poor one. Similarly, if one option gets no ticks, it is a poor question.

Fourthly, the layout of questions is important. Each option should ideally be about the same length. Each option should linguistically be distinct. i.e. you do not want two options beginning with one wording and the third with a different wording. In this respect I find the multi-choice questions on AQA GCSE French papers wanting a little.

And last, questions may take the form of a question with three or four different answers, or they may begin with a partial sentence completed in three or four different ways. The latter format is, I suspect, more common. Anyway, it's all good fun and setting multi-choice questions is a good mental exercise. I have little against the format and disagree with those who say it is a way of trying to catch out students and that it is somehow unfair. Well, yes, it is trying the catch out students and that's the point. The thing is to make sure the level of task is fair.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,