The Reason to Love Multiple Choice

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Clarissa

July 23, 2016

People keep asking me this, so I’ll just write a post about it.

We all know that I have strong opinions on education. I don’t like multiple choice, projects, book reports, homework, and learning foreign languages by talking about them in English. I’m very particular and often quite crabby about all this stuff.
However, when Klara goes to school, she is likely to encounter all of these things. This means that I have a few years to learn to be wildly enthusiastic about them. And the enthusiasm has to be entirely sincere.

A child is completely defenceless against a parent’s worldview. Transmitting to a child the belief that things are wrong, unfair, miserable and bad creates deep and life-altering anxieties. It is immoral and self-indulgent to sacrifice a child’s urgent need to live in a world where everything is good and right to an adult’s lazy grumpiness. But a child can’t be tricked. Children see past what you say to what you really feel. You can’t transmit to them the joy you don’t feel.
So to promote my personal growth, I will be administering a multiple choice exam in my own classroom this year, and I will love it.

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16 responses to “The Reason to Love Multiple Choice ”

Shakti

July 23, 2016

What?

Ok here goes:

Multiple choice reflects real life. In many real life situations, you will not have to generate answers from scratch or an infinite number of possibilities against one framework but will have to choose from a set number of options against one framework. Multiple choice encourages people to evaluate choices quickly and decisively according to a framework. Multiple choice in language helps people learn what looks right versus what looks wrong, and helps people internalize simple rules. One must internalize simple rules before breaking them, before going on to complex rules and before using multiple rules at one time. Simplicity is the building block to complexity and ambiguity.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 23, 2016
  
  Wow. You are GOOD. You are ready to start procreating immediately. (But only if you want to, of course.)
  Seriously, this is so good. I have the world’s most brilliant readers.
  
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David Gendron

July 23, 2016

I don’t think you should administrate a multiple choice test at an university. (except maybe a 2% of the final grade quiz, and I don’t think this is a good thing in language learning (maybe in a literature course, though))

Teaching is not about your personal growth nor about Klara’s one, it’s about your students’ growth.

However, you should not share your hate of multiple choice tests to Klara, that’s what your post is about.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 23, 2016
  
  Students will be fine. They will be happy as clams. 🙂
  
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  1. David Gendron
    
    July 25, 2016
    
    Evaluations are not about make your students happy.
    
    (But I agree that they would be happy, though.)
    
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    1. David Gendron
      
      July 25, 2016
      
      making…
      
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Alex

July 23, 2016

Multiple choice has a certain amount of practical utility in small doses. It’s fine for quick checkpoints to see how things are going, short quizzes just to incentivize studying. It also has utility in research, since it is objective enough (at least by some definitions) that you can use it to compare results in different classes.

But for any deeply meaningful evaluation you need free-response questions.

I have been known to allocate about 15% of the points on midterms to multiple-choice questions…but I usually say “Here are 8 statements. At least one is true. Circle ALL of the true statements.” There can be more than one answer, and sometimes there are even two correct answers that are superficially at odds but are in fact both true, and they need to recognize that. Other times there’s another statement that is superficially equivalent to another, but in fact they are very different and one is true but not the other. They need to recognize that.

If I’m really sadistic I give a list of a dozen similar statements, ask them to tell me which are true and which are false, and then EXPLAIN WHY each one is true or false.

Superficially these things look like the “multiple choice conceptual questions” that all of the hip, progressive physics education fad enthusiasts are enamored of, but in fact they are much harder than that.

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David Gendron

July 23, 2016

Personally, I like homework, but I understand this is not so good in language learning.

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1. el
  
  July 23, 2016
  
  \ Personally, I like homework, but I understand this is not so good in language learning.
  
  I learned both English and Hebrew by doing lots of HW / studying at home.
  
  How else would one learn new words, practice new grammar rules or attempt to read texts alone in the relevant language?
  
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  1. David Gendron
    
    July 23, 2016
    
    Humm, you make a very good point here. But, I’m not sure because of Google Translate.
    
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  2. Clarissa
    
    July 23, 2016
    
    “How else would one learn new words, practice new grammar rules or attempt to read texts alone in the relevant language?”
    
    Until the age of 10 – and ideally 12 – if it can’t be learned in the classroom, it doesn’t need to be learned. As I keep saying, I started learning Spanish at 23 and I speak it perfectly. And I’m bad at languages. Nobody will be deprived of anything if they don’t learn foreign languages until their teenage years. But people who didn’t get to play enough as children are always deficient as adults.
    
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    1. David Gendron
      
      July 25, 2016
      
      Ok, I agree. Homeworks for kids are counterproductive.
      
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Evelina Anville

July 23, 2016

Why is it harmful to Klara if you are honest with her and discuss the reasons you think multiple choice exams are problematic? I never liked multiple choice exams and always preferred essay exams but I still enjoyed school. It never really haunted me or anything when I encountered a multiple choice exam.

I understand that painting the world as a dangerous or unhappy place is problematic. But this seems like a relatively minor thing and multiple choice exams are really bad assessment tools. Can’t parents share any of their insights or opinions with their children in your view?

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 23, 2016
  “Can’t parents share any of their insights or opinions with their children in your view?”
  
  It depends on the age. Anything can be discussed but at an appropriate time. My parents, for instance,fostered my excitement about all of the Soviet stuff, the young pioneers, the stories about little Lenin, etc. Only when I was old enough to process it, did they introduce me to the truth about the whole thing.
  
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  1. valter07
    
    July 25, 2016
    
    And it worked for you. But for some other kid it could feel like betrayal and could seriously diminish his/her trust in parents.
    I am of the opinion that one cannot prevent all psychological issues from happening anyway, thus it is better to be honest and not to be too afraid that kids will assimilate your correct opinions. 🙂 Besides, I cannot imagine in what context you could be discussing multiple choice tests with Klara at a very early age? If you do not administer them, she will not see you grading them. So she will experience them for the first time at school, and it will be “just the way school is”… At that time you will not be her one and only reference point…
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      July 25, 2016
      
      Many of my colleagues undermine their children’s school experience by being nitpicking, critical, grumbly refuseniks. They ridicule everything the teachers do from the heights of their professorial wisdom. It gets so bad that it resembles a competitive sport. How this affects the children doesn’t seem to bother anybody.
      
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