Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:4408] Can multiple choice questions promote higher order thinking in e-learning?
From: Chris Brannigan (chris@caspianlearning.co.uk)
Date: Wed 26 Feb 2003 - 04:24:34 MET
From: "Chris Brannigan" <chris@caspianlearning.co.uk> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:4408] Can multiple choice questions promote higher order thinking in e-learning? Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 16:24:34 +1300
Hi Yasmine and others,
Output from a current project of ours appears to suggest that
multiple-choice questions can promote higher order thinking - for reasons
that are entirely inline with constructivist theories and known research
findings. That is, the likelihood of this happening will vary according to
the degree to which the multiple choice questions and learning
infrastructure: promote direct performance activity by the student on the
learning materials; and how far this performance activity engenders
elaborate encoding of the learning materials.
In our project we have built an immersive learning environment to enhance
knowledge acquisition performance. Although the environment is highly
interactive and promotes high levels of active learning behaviours, we
specifically sought to include some tasks that were more behaviourist or
direct instruction in nature to compliment a battery of higher-level
cognitive tasks. The objective of the behaviourist based tasks being to
embed a corpus of declarative knowledge about a given knowledge domain such
that it can be recalled later in response to appropriate stimuli. The
objective of the cognitive tasks being to engage the student in various
manipulations of that knowledge in support of learning objectives. The
highly interactive nature of the immersive learning environment allows us
objectively monitor and measure specific student behaviours undertaken while
performing these tasks.
Multiple-choice questions were included within some of the behaviourist
based tasks, the student must view questions then seek out learning content
within the 3D environment that enables them to answer successfully, or of
course they could guess. We were able to record a multitude of measures that
provide a precise picture of how students interacted with the learning
content within these tasks. Some clear distinctions arose between
performance on different multiple choice based tasks that shared the same
format.
In some tasks the student could answer successfully via a relatively short
and low effort search. They were able to quickly explore the 3D environment
and locate the content that provided the necessary answers. This was pretty
consistent whether the question was rated 'high difficulty' or 'low
difficulty'.
In other tasks of the same format, to answer successfully, the student would
need to combine the content element with a second or third content element
in some fashion such as additive or deletion or substitution. All measures
of student behaviour increased - Frequency of content viewing; time spent
viewing individual content elements; revisits to related content elements;
total spatial distances covered; errors made; answers attempted; time per
question; etc. The same tasks appeared to encourage different strategies to
be employed. In the first case students would start with random movements
then quickly move into an expert mode where their exploration of the
environment was efficient. In the second case, students would start random
but then move into a longer consolidation phase where their movements were
not random but were repeated, before moving into expert mode where they
could solve the task efficiently.
When retested later on a refresher - recall was higher in the second case.
Futhermore, successful performance on these tasks enabled more rapid
achievement on higher level cognitive tasks which were undertaken later. It
would appear that some of the multiple choice type tasks promoted high
levels of performance activity and elaborate encoding behaviours in the
students. The level of higher order thinking engendered was clearly
restricted as we did not require students to perform extrapolations on the
learning content in order to answer the multiple choice questions, that was
undertaken in cognitive tasks.
The data is preliminary, as this is not the focus of our project, but we
were immediately struck by this trend. However, we should not have been so
surprised as it fits within a constructivist explanation - see jonassens
review @ http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/courses/CLE/ . I will put
up some data when we get the chance to fully evaluate this effect.
Chris
www.caspianlearning.co.uk
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