The Best of both Worlds: Expanding the Depth and Breadth of Multiple-Choice Questions

Multiple-choice questions are a common means of assessment thought to be an objective way to evaluate students’ knowledge recall. However, there are several limitations when utilizing multiple-choice questions for assessment. Depending upon the way the question is formulated, multiple-choice questions often do not allow for assessment of higher order cognitive skills. Well-designed short-answer questions are generally considered superior to multiple-choice questions at requiring students to analyse, synthesize, and apply their knowledge. Additionally, when answering multiple-choice questions, students may be able to guess the correct answers, thus nullifying the ability of the question to validly assess student knowledge. This paper introduces a type of expanded multiple-choice question requiring students to explain why they chose the answer they did. Such examination questions potentially capitalize on the advantages, and minimize the disadvantages, of traditional multiple-choice questions. This paper discusses the use of expanded multiple-choice questions for assessment and compares student responses to expanded multiple-choice questions vs. short-answer questions to determine the effectiveness of such questions in an undergraduate class in speech acoustics.