5 Tips for Designing Multiple Choice Quizzes

Hello colleagues, Many teachers use quizzes to assess learners' understanding of course material. We can also use quizzes to deepen students' learning. In a recent blog post, researcher Youki Terada writes, "Quizzes are not just assessments. When designed well, they can be effective learning tools, reinforcing a student’s comprehension of the material."

Moreover, according to Terada, brain science offers teachers some useful tips for writing multiple choice quizzes that can support and deepen students' learning.

There is a science to writing good quiz questions. Check out the tips and let us know what stands out to you.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, Teaching & Learning CoP

Comments

Hi Susan,

The blog post sounds interesting. Could you post a link? I would definitely like to know how to write better quizzes.

Thanks,
Eric

Hi All, 

I believe this is the link to the artice: https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-tips-designing-multiple-choice-quizzes. I especially enjoyed and agreed with the point of effective feedback as an important component of the learning process. 

Writing effective questions is also about ensuring effective feedback.

Kathy 

Thanks, Kathy. The suggestion to have only 3 answer choices is interesting, as is the warning about exposing students to a number of incorrect answers. We've been writing a lot of sample HSE math problems recently. We've noticed that there are usually distractors that are tempting but incorrect, so we've been writing our questions in a similar way. This makes me wonder if this is the right approach. I'm torn. We want students to have practice with the kind of questions that they will get on the exam, but we don't want complicate their learning in the meantime. But it would be weird if we only had 3 answer choices on practice test questions...

Maybe the distinction is about the purpose of a quiz. It seems that it should generally be about helping students learn the material, know they have learned the material, and show teachers to what extent students have learned. Those quizzes maybe should be written more in line with this set of recommendations. Practice test questions, on the other hand, may have a different purpose that is about preparing for another exam.

It seems that an important role of quizzes is learning, not just assessment. This may be why attentive students should get 70-80% of the answers correct (maybe even more?). The quiz should be accessible so that it confirms what students know and at times makes them reach, but builds confidence in students who have been engaged and learning in the class.

Eric