I have been conducting some research this week and decided to write out everything that I found on this blog.
The research I did gave me a lot of useful advice, which was as follows:
- The first thing to do before you start writing the question is this - ask yourself, 'what am I testing?'
- The direct question format (Which of the following cities is the capital of California?) is more effective than the incomplete statement format (The capital of California is............)
- Avoid making your correct answer the short or long answer
- Balance the placement of the correct answer as correct answers are usually the second or third options
- Balance the placement of the correct answer as correct answers are usually the second or third options
- Avoid the use of negatives in the stem (of the question) unless capitalizing, underlining or using bold-face to make the negative obvious
- Avoid using all of the above or none of the above
- Place most of the words in the question stem
- Make all distractors plausible
- Use simple sentence structure and precise wording
I found all of this information on various websites which are cited below, and I plan on following all of these rules when writing the multiple-choice tests for my project.
There were many other rules that I found, but I chose these 9 pieces of advice because they directly applied to my test and because I found that they were the most general rules, meaning that they often appeared in more than one website. This showed me that they were common rules that were often given as advice, which makes them reliable. The websites I used were mostly help sites for teachers or websites directly affiliated with an educational faculty, such as a university.
Moreover, my mother gave me a piece of advice and told me to 'take the test a week after you have written it and weed out the questions that you can’t understand or that you don’t know the answers to'. I will definitely follow this advice.
The websites were:
"How to Write a Good Multiple-choice Question." Hot Potatoes Home Page. Web. 17 Oct. 2011. <http://hotpot.uvic.ca/howto/mcquestion.htm>.
"14 Rules for Writing Multiple Choice Questions." BYU Faculty Centre. Brigham Faculty Center. Web. 20 Oct. 2011. <http://testing.byu.edu/info/handbooks/14%20Rules%20for%20Writing%20Multiple-Choice%20Questions.pdf>.
"General Guidelines for Developing Multiple Choice Items." Tomorrow's Professors. Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. <http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=932&search=general%20guidelines>.
"10 Rules For Writing Multiple Choice Questions." The ELearning Coach. Web. 27 Nov. 2011. <http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/rules-for-multiple-choice-questions/>.
