When I was completing my teacher-education program, one of the most fascinating classes I took was on assessment. While we covered the more dry topics of standardized tests, scoring, and standard deviations, we also spent time on test writing. Knowing how to write a good test is an invaluable skill for a teacher, as these assessments help to show what students have learned, how students have interpreted and understood instruction, and what needs to be retaught (if you’re lucky enough to have the time!).
Of all the question types available to teachers, multiple-choice questions, I think, are the most challenging. Here, then, are some tips for how to write these tricky test items.
- Use only distracters that make sense. Avoid providing choices that are giveaways, choices that are obviously wrong. Giving only plausible answers challenges students to think more critically about content to arrive at the correct answer. This is, after all, the goal of a well-written multiple-choice test item.
- Avoid questions that ask for simple factual recall. Instead, use Bloom’s taxonomy to craft either sentence completion or question items so that students have to engage in higher-order thinking to arrive at the correct answer.
- Keep all the options of similar lengths, or provide two options that are the same length and then another two options that are the same length. You don’t want to give students the correct answer by making it stand out from other choices—this only discourages the kind of intensive thinking you would want your questions to generate.
- Make all answers choices grammatically consistent. Again, if the correct choice or if some of the incorrect choices deviate from the general grammatical construction of the question, the answer might be given away.
- Answers and question stems for other items on the test should not provide clues to any questions. Each question should fulfill its role of having a student engage in clear, critical thinking to determine the correct answer.
- If you are using negative questions (like “Which of these is NOT an example of . . .”), make sure that the word defining the negative question—i.e., not, only, never, etc.—is clearly set off with bold, italics, or capital letters. Some test experts caution test writers never to use this type of item, but I find that as long as it does not confuse students, a question like this can actually encourage deep thinking as the student has to closely examine each choice in the question.
- Keep the question stem as short and as direct as possible. Writing a test is no different than other prose—it should not be wordy.
- To make your test more challenging, you can include two types of distracters. The first provides an answer choice that twists the words of the author. Use exact words from a passage you are asking about, but change the order slightly so that the meaning of the author’s words is different. The second type of distracter is the correct answer to a different question. Provide answer choices that are correct statements, but that would not answer the question provided
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