The Maine Cohort for Customized Learning (MCCL) is teaching teachers that content is not enough to drive instruction. Instruction must include three things: content, complex reasoning skills, and habits of mind.
This is great when it comes to designing units that teach students the skills they will need to thrive in the work force or college after high school however, it can make assessment difficult. How can you tell the different between a student getting the question wrong because he/she didn't understand the content and a student getting the question wrong because they failed to use the complex reasoning skill correctly?
Well, in an assessment literacy workshop I took with Anita McCafferty and Jeff Beaudry last year I learned how to make use of my distractors on a multiple choice test to get a better idea why a student got a question wrong.
It's all about how you write the question. Ideally your question should include the correct answer and the following types of distractors:
1) Faulty Reasoning
2) Partial Understanding
3) Misconception
By setting up your multiple choice questions with these types of distractors you can get a relatively good idea why a student got a question incorrect and adjust your teaching accordingly.
If you would like to see an example of a question written like this then click on this link. This will take you to a multiple choice question, the poem the question is about, and a detailed explanation of my thinking process in picking the distractors.
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