31 Lab 12: Designing Multiple-Choice Practice Questions – Part I

In addition to the neuroscience literacy fair, we will also have a portion of the Brain Bee event that is a neuroscience quiz for the high school participants. You and your classmates will help develop the questions to be asked during that quiz. The questions come from what you learned in Brain and Behaviour and through this textbook.

Assignment: Your team will submit one multiple choice practice question per team member (i.e., 3-4 questions per team).

This week, the focus is on selecting the answers you wish the high school participants to know, and then creating the questions (also called the “stems”). We’ll write the “distractors” (wrong answers to the multiple choice questions) in an upcoming lab. NOTE: Your group is not developing a list of potential answers; develop just the answer (neuroscientific fact) and a question that should lead to that answer (Think Jeopardy-style.).

Step 1. Split up your team’s Lim OER chapter so that you each have a different section. This way, you will each write a question on a different topic. Also, decide who is doing the easy, medium, and difficult questions.

Step 2. Select something from your section of the chapter you wish the high school students to know. This is the correct (or best) answer to your multiple choice question. Do not tell your teammates your answer yet.

Step 3. Write a question (“stem”) that corresponds to your “best answer” from step 2.

Step 4. Read your question and answer. Do they make sense together grammatically? Revise the question and/or answer as necessary.

Step 5. Test your teammates. If you read them the question, can they produce the “best answer”? This is harder to do than answering a multiple choice question, so don’t worry about wrong answers (as there is no penalty for erroneous answers), but record everyone’s answers. Was anyone’s answer “more correct” than your intended answer? Why?

Step 6. Assign everyone a question created by another teammate. Attempt to find your assigned question’s answer in your Lim OER chapter. You can think of this as “fact-checking” your teammate’s question. Revise the question and/or answer as necessary. Record the section and page number for the question.

Step 7. Submit the document of work – including each question; the level of difficulty; the intended answer; any incorrect answers from groupmates; as well as the final, edited questions and answers here. A group manager should submit your group’s work in a single Word document and organize the document by question (i.e., Question 1 drafted question, level of difficulty, intended answer, other answers, edited question and answer, Question 2 drafted question, level of difficulty, intended answer, other answers, edited question and answer, etc.). Be sure to include the final question and answer.

Summary of Some Helpful Tips Modified from University of Waterloo:

1. Ask a specific question in your stem. The question “Which of the following is correct?” is not specific enough. Frame the topic (content you want the students to know) with the stem you write.
2. In your stem, use wording telling the students to select the best answer (not the correct answer).
3. Avoid using words in the stem that are the same as the wording in the correct answer. Otherwise, students will tend to select the correct answer based on association clues.
4. Let’s aim to make questions that allow the students to feel some success with material that is covered in the Lim OER. Don’t try to trick them.
5. Use positive wording as much as possible. Negative wording can sometimes be overlooked and confuse people trying to answer your questions.
6. Avoid a wordy stem. Get to the point of your question.
7. Be sure the answer reads grammatically correct with the stem.
8. Avoid absolutes – ex. all, none, never, always, etc. – in your stem.

University of Waterloo. Designing Multiple-Choice Questions. Retrieved January 12, 2024, from University’s website: https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/catalogs/tip-sheets/designing-multiple-choice-questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.