If you’re an instructor or course developer—or simply train others—you need
Write Better Multiple-Choice Questions. The information in this book will help you appropriately assess participant success and course quality.
Research points to the multitude of course and competency assessments that are poorly written, measure the wrong things, and are difficult to understand. Any of these problems can result in frustrated and angry participants, useless assessment information, and possibly even legal battles. We must avoid these problems.
We know that well-written multiple-choice questions can efficiently measure a wide range of important learning outcomes, not just recall of course content (contrary to inaccurate popular opinion). And well-written, higher-level multiple-choice assessments can be an effective proxy for higher levels of measurement. “Well-written” means our questions:
- Measure the right things,
- Don’t trick or frustrate test-takers, and
- Are written so they are easy to understand and answer.
Write Better Multiple-Choice Questions is a “how-to” guide for creating well-written multiple-choice questions for people who deliver or develop training and instruction. The explanations, examples, and exercises work together to build practical knowledge and skill in writing good, valuable, and relevant multiple-choice questions. It provides insights from practice and summaries of each chapter. The extensive bibliography includes both authoritative and contemporary references on common multiple-choice question writing issues.
Some of the most important issues discussed in this book include:
- Gaining the benefits of multiple-choice questions while overcoming the challenges.
- Writing performance-based learning objectives that tell us what is important to assess.
- Writing multiple-choice questions that adequately assess the learning objectives.
- Assessing real-life and job-task thinking processes in our multiple-choice questions.
- Building critical higher-level multiple-choice questions.
- Crafting valuable and relevant stems, answer choices, and distractors.
- Writing distractors that distinguish between those who know and those who don’t.
- Writing feedback that moves participants forward.
- Reviewing assessments adequately before using them.
- Assessing the quality of assessments.
- And more…
Patti Shank, PhD, is an internationally-known workplace learning expert, instructional designer, researcher, and author
who
is regularly quoted as one of the most influential people in e-learning and instructional design. She speaks regularly at training and learning technology conferences and is the author of
Write and Organize for Deeper Learning and
Manage Memory for Deeper Learning, which are available internationally on Amazon.
Her current evidence-based articles are available on eLearning Industry (https://elearningindustry.com/members/patti-shank-phd) and elsewhere. Patti completed her PhD at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research on new online learners won an EDMEDIA best research paper award.
Patti builds and facilitates blended online courses for individuals and teams, and you can find out more about her Write Better Multiple-Choice Questions course: https://dlaw.newzenler.com/courses/mcqsp.
She lives in Colorado, USA, with her husband and her cats, Max and Zoe. She loves to hike, watch “The Voice,” struggle with growing vegetables in a very short growing season, and attend live music and comedy. She’s truly passionate about the results needed from training and instruction and has spent her career helping others “do what works.”
