Mostly Not Multiple Choice

Multiple choice questions are one tool in the learning tool kit and we do use them for some questions - probably less than 2%. However, curious things happen with multiple choice answers and we aim to capture these effects beneficially, rather than have them battering learners haphazardly.

• Typed (or written) answers are about formulating the correct answer, and this develops a different thought process to recognising a correct answer in a multiple choice line up.
• Multiple choice doesn't give learners an opportunity to remember to include units.
• Multiple choice encourages guessing when the answer is not known and motivation is low.
• Multiple choice questions can be hacked if the distractors (ie wrong answers) are not chosen carefully. It may not be necessary to calculate the correct answer if there's another way to it. For example if the question is 42 - 23, and the options are are 19, 20 and 22, a bright student will see the question as odd - even = odd and will be able to tell you that the answer is 19 without doing any calculation at all.
• Here's an effect that isn't all that intuitive: red herrings make good bait. This question was given to 15 year olds in New Zealand:
  
  Gym membership $320. Save 20%. How much will you save?
  A. $20
  B. $32
  C. $60
  D. $64
  The correct answer is of course D: $64. However, only 6% of repondents got this right. The most common answer was A $20, simply because '20' appears in the question.
• Multiple choice answers slow kids down, as they introduce an extra step of checking each given answer before deciding which is best. For ADD / ADHD kids, speedbumps like this increase restlessness.
• Multiple choice only allows a limited number of attempts for a never wrong, only not yet right approach.
• Neural pathways are reinforced on clicked answers. It does not matter if they are right, the answer that is clicked may be remembered. Quite commonly, kids answer 54 for 8×7 for example. Having this as an option reinforces the wrong answer. Not having it as an option means kids know it's the one around there, so 54 is still reinforced as it was useful to them. (see right or not right yet for the 0maths approach). Incidentally, we screen wrong answers for wrong rote learning.
• We do use multiple choice in a few places where the intention is to seed memories. These probably make up less than 2% of question types:
  • When introducing new words.
  • In some tasks for learning a times table - so that all numbers in the table become familiar over time.
  • When teaching odd/ even as a means of checking answers (as above).