Multiple Choice Questions

Assessing Higher Level Thinking

Multiple choice questions have gained a fairly negative reputation as being capable only of assessing factual recall (e.g., vocabulary). However, well-written multiple choice questions have the potential to assess many other higher level thinking skills.

Test items must possess two essential characteristics in order to assess cognitive abilities other than recall:

1. The item must confront students with a novel problem situation that requires them to assess the situation and derive an acceptable solution by using both—

their knowledge of the relevant subject matter, and

their reasoning skills.

2. The correct solution mode must not be specified.

The novel problem situations should not be completely foreign to the students’ experience. Novelty is a matter of degree. Hence, you must be cautious to avoid creating too large of a gap between what students should have learned directly and what they should be able to conclude by reasoning.

The problems in the test should assess the same learning objectives that guided the instruction, but should be embedded in a new context that requires students to transfer to this new setting the knowledge, understanding, and cognitive abilities they previously learned.

In other words, the tasks presented in the test should require students to reason with their knowledge to—

1. Correctly diagnose and interpret the nature of the problem;
2. Decide which principles, generalizations, or criteria are relevant;
3. Recognize common exceptions and give defensible reasons to justify classifying them as exceptions;
4. Successfully implement and justify an appropriate course of action.

Here are a couple of examples of multiple choice questions that assess more than factual recall:

Example 1:
In a certain genus there are two species. Species A reproduces by fission; Species B reproduces by gametes. If the environment changes, what would you expect the chances of survival for each species to be?

A. Greater for Species A than for Species B.
B. Greater for Species B than for Species A.
C. Unchanged for both species A and B.
D. About zero for both species A and B.

Example 2:
If the radius of the earth were increased by 6 feet, how much larger would its circumference be at the equator?

A. 13 feet
B. 19 feet
C. 38 feet
D. 59 feet
E. 113 feet

Your task now is to create your own multiple choice questions. Using the same subject matter that you chose for your matching exercise, determine at least one objective that might be assessed using multiple choice questions. Using the guidelines provided in the previous pages, write three multiple choice questions on that content that assess more than factual recall.

When you have finished writing your multiple choice questions, click Next below to learn about short answer questions.