Educational Leadership - September 2015

Multiple-choice questions draw criticism because many people perceive that they test only recall or atomistic, surface- level objectives and do not require students to think. Although this can be the case, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Open-ended questions are an important part of both instruction and assessment, and students should be challenged to both ask and answer them. However, multiple-choice questions have advantages that make them a useful part of any teacher’s questioning repertoire.

First, they do not require extensive written or spoken answers, just a choice. Students without well-developed oral or written language skills can still show their thinking skills.

Some students particularly like multiple-choice items for this reason.

Second, you can ask and answer a lot more
multiple-choice questions than open-ended
questions in a given period of time. This means
you can cover the content more extensively,
asking questions about more aspects of the
content students are studying.

So how can teachers write and use multiple-choice questions to assess higher-order thinking?

Writing Effective Questions

Well-written multiple-choice items conform to a set of guidelines. They ask or imply a direct question. They use clear, non-textbook language that is as simple as possible. The answer choices are all plausible answers to the question, arranged as logically as possible.

Ideally, the choices should reflect common errors in student thinking so that even wrong answers give students and teachers information about what students know and can do.