Multiple Choice Doesn't Have to be Boring

Interested in providing your students with an opportunity to clear up misunderstandings and misconceptions, to collaborate with their peers, and to develop critical thinking skills? (And who isn't?) Then this is the post for you!

I'm not a huge fan of multiple choice assessments; I just never felt like they told me the whole story of what my students understood and didn't understand. But, I often had multiple choice assessments lying around, whether they were sample AP, SAT, or MCAS exams or standardized multiple-choice exams that came with the published study guides accompanying a novel or a textbook. And these assessments did come in handy for the following task for my students.

Placing my students into heterogeneous groups of 3 or 4 students (usually chosen at random), I'd give each group a copy of the same multiple choice assessment (sometimes with the aim of reviewing at the end of a lesson or unit, sometimes with the aim of targeting the use of a particular skill, etc.). First, I'd require all students to complete the multiple choice questions independently. Their next step was to share their answers within just their small group and not stop until they had reached consensus on each answer. This requires a lot of collaborative skill and higher-order thinking, as students would engage in some debate with one another, and would delve back into their notes or their text in order to provide support for which answer they felt was correct. They really had to get good at justifying their claims with evidence. (This doesn't happen overnight -- I was sure to teach and discuss collaborative skills with my students, and also teach and discuss how best to debate, to justify your answers, etc.)

The final step, once each small group had reached consensus, was to open the debate up to the entire class. Now, their job was for each group to share their answers and to eventually reach consensus as a whole class. Once again, those skills of being able to justify their claims with evidence started to come in handy.

[Often, I'd stipulate that they could not stop until the entire class had reached consensus on every single answer -- this is the only way they'd earn a grade on the assignment. Sometimes, though, certain answers would be debated seemingly endlessly, and I'd have to table the discussion on those items and accept individual answers.]

What was great about this exercise was the development of collaborative skills and critical thinking skills. But, as a teacher, it was also a fantastic opportunity for me to assess students' current understandings and skill levels, leading to my own informed instruction. (Plus, it's a nice way to jazz up the use of multiple choice questions -- they really don't have to be boring!)

Face Value -- Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Do you have students who accept everything they read in a newspaper or in a magazine or see on the Internet at face value? I'm willing to bet you do. (I'm even willing to bet you know some adults who are too often guilty of this!) This is a dangerous way, Kelly Gallagher (author of Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts and my latest in a long line of academic crushes) warns, "to read your way through life" (2004, p. 84).  And, regardless of content area, we want our students to dig around beneath the surface of the information they're encountering, to think about what's not being said.

A great way to get into this with students, according to Gallagher, is by examining tables, charts, and graphs. Here's a chart Gallagher shares with his students (p. 83):

Influenza-related deaths have increased dramatically since the 1970s.

Influenza Deaths                                       Influenza Deaths

1977                                                           1999

Approximately 18,000                      Approximately 65,000

Gallagher asks students to fill in the left side of a t-chart by listing everything the chart tells them. They might list the following: influenza deaths rose dramatically between 1977 and 1999; in 1977, there were approximately 18,000 deaths; in 1999, there were approximately 65,000 deaths.

Next, it's time to encourage students to dig a little deeper -- what's not being said in the chart? Students use the right side of their t-charts to brainstorm everything this chart may be leaving out, a list that might include: what caused this dramatic rise in influenza deaths?; where were these deaths? in the U.S.? elsewhere?; who is the source of this information?

Finally, Gallagher asks his students to think about this question: What might have caused such a dramatic rise in flu-related deaths? He records their inferences on the board (such inferences might include: there were more strains of the flu in 1999 than in 1977; people in 1999 had worse medical care than in 1977; flu vaccines stopped working; there were more people in 1999 than in 1977). Gallagher is "train[ing his] students not only to notice what is said, but also to infer what is left unsaid . . . [He] want[s] them to realize that every time something is said, something remains unsaid, and that every time something is written, something remains unwritten" (p. 84).

Bonus: I think this would make a wonderful pre-reading activity if students are about to read a piece of text that includes charts, graphs, and/or tables. Doing this exercise with a graph that's about to appear in the reading students will later do can provide students with an interesting purpose to read -- perhaps they will learn more through reading the entire text, and, if they don't, what will this tell them about this particular source? Students could even be encouraged to conduct further research (a lovely extension activity!).

Digging Below the Surface

Let’s have some fun with reading today! I’ve borrowed the following passage from Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12 (I’ll be writing a series of blog posts based on this text in the upcoming weeks that will fall under the umbrella of Reading Across the Content Areas – you can see the first blog post here). Read through the passage, and then answer the following 4 questions (also from Gallagher).

Go ahead . . . I’ll wait . . .

How to Bartle Puzballs

There are tork gooboos of puzballs, including laplies, mushos, and fushos. Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they do not grunto any lipples. In order to geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples, you should bartle the fusho who has rarckled the parshtootoos after her humply fluflu.

1.     How many gooboos of puzballs are there?

2.     What are laplies, mushos, and fushos?

3.     Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they will not what?

4.     How can you geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples?

How’d you do? Here’s the answer key:

1.     There are tork gooboos of puzballs.

2.     Laplies, mushos, and fushos are tork gooboos of puzballs.

3.     They will not grunto any lipples.

4.     You should bartle the fusho who has rarckled her parshtootoos after her humply fluflu (Gallagher, 2004, p. 4).

I’m willing to bet you got all or most of those questions correct. But I’m also willing to bet that you don’t know what gooboos, puzballs, or mushos are and that you don’t have a clue about what you just read in that passage (I know this because Gallagher used nonsense words and made it all up).

This exercise translates right into what we want to avoid in our classrooms when assigning reading. Sure, we can assign reading and ask students to answer questions based on that reading. And our students might get all the questions correct. But do they really understand what they’ve read?

If the questions we ask don’t require higher-order thinking skills (like evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing), then they run the risk of remaining so much on the surface that students can answer them without even understanding what they’ve read (probably similar to the way you were able to answer those questions on gooboos and lipples). This ends up telling us very little to nothing about our students’ understanding, when we need to be striving to effectively check for understanding throughout our lessons and units in order to best help our students grow as learners.

We don’t want our students to be reading in our content areas at a “puzball-level” (Gallagher, 2004, p. 5). We want them to be looking below the surface. We want them to be using higher-order thinking skills.

Try keeping a copy of good old Bloom’s taxonomy where you write your lesson plans and your assessments so that you can easily refer to it. Or run your questions by a colleague (or your district’s friendly instructional coach, wink wink) to get another perspective on them.