Multiple Choice is a highly effective form of assessment
Multiple choice questions have the benefit of being able to be quickly graded and to provide analyzable data to educators and students. But a lot of non-educators think of multiple-choice questions as “multiple guess,” with no real benefit except expediency for the teacher. Most educators know this couldn’t be further from the truth! With the use of distractor answers and statistical analyses like the point-biserial correlation analysis provided in Quick Key’s Itemization Export.
Writing great questions isn’t hard if you know a few key principles
I am on the hunt for an expert opinion on how to explain the many benefits of multiple-choice questions to parents and other non-educators. But in the meantime, here is one of the best resources I have yet found about how to write great multiple-choice questions: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/writing-good-multiple-choice-test-questions/
Vanderbilt Center for Teaching provides an excellent Guide to writing highly effective MC questions
- Constructing an Effective Stem
- Constructing Effective Alternatives
- Additional Guidelines for Multiple Choice Questions
- Considerations for Writing Multiple Choice Items that Test Higher-order Thinking
- Additional Resources
