Teachers need to harness the power of “competitive multiple-choice questions” and ”competitive true-false” statement questions to boost student learning, according to Elizabeth Bjork, professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a world-leading expert on retrieval practice.
Speaking at the World Education Summit on Thursday, Professor Bjork said teachers should look to bring in more “desirable difficulty” to testing in order to boost learning outcomes, and that multiple-choice questions and true-or-false questions offer a way to do this that shouldn’t be overlooked.
“We’ve shown that giving students a practice test using what we’ve come to call competitive multiple-choice questions - that is, a question on which all of the provided choices are competitive or plausible answers - can be just as beneficial to the student’s ability to perform well on a later exam.”
She explained that not only does this boost learning on what the right answer is but that it also helps boost “students’ ability to answer questions about one of the formerly incorrect alternatives”.
The research paper she co-authored on this with Jeri Little, an assistant professor in the psychology department at California State University, details how this approach benefited students who sat tests on the solar system.
“After students have received a lesson on the solar system, we gave them a practice multiple-choice test on which the questions contain both some competitive and some non-competitive alternatives.
“Then on a later exam, we found students to be significantly better at answering new questions about the competitive alternatives but we saw no such improvement for their ability to answer later questions about the non-competitive alternatives.”
Professor Bjork says they hypothesise that the benefits from this are likely because the effort of working out the right answer not only strengthens their knowledge on the right answer, but also around the other potential right answers, because “it strengthens what they previously heard or read about the each of the competitive alternatives”.
Despite the positives of this approach, though, she said teachers should be aware that regularly including competitive multiple-choice tests within instructional practices is “difficult to create”.
“Even teachers who are eager to use them tell us that they are sometimes floored in their efforts to do so simply because of the difficulty of coming up with four or five competitive alternatives to each question.”
However, she said one way this can be made simpler is by applying a similar competitive approach to true-false questions, as research by student Jordan Brabec at the University of California has uncovered.
“A particularly important discovery of Jordan’s is that what we’ve come to call ‘competitive true-false’ questions are able to produce enhanced later performance for both previously asked questions and related questions should they appear on a later exam,” she explained.
She gave the example of students having a lesson on Yellowstone Park and some the geysers to be found there - and then students being set the ‘competitive true-false question’ of “Steamboat Geyser, not Castle Geyser, is the oldest geyser in Yellowstone Park” (the answer to which is “false”).
Professor Bjork said that in being asked this question, students retrieve “both what they have learned about Steamboat Geyser, and what they have learned about Castle Geyser” - and then are better at answering questions about either one of them on a later exam.
Her comments came as part of a wide-ranging panel discussion on the future of assessment that also saw Professor Sugata Mitra argue students should be given access to the internet in exams to make them relevant for the modern world.
Dan Worth is senior editor at Tes
