Workshop Details


Thursday, March 4, 2010

 

Workshop Title: Writing Meaningful Objectives and Effective Multiple Choice Questions

Faculty and Institutions: Dean Parmelee, Krane Kevin Paul Koles

This workshop is conducted in a Team- Based Learning™ (TBL) format. It is designed
to enable faculty to write meaningful learning objectives for a unit of study and to craft well-written and more effective multiple- choice questions that reflect those objectives. Novel idea? Unfortunately, many of us have written our exam questions just before the deadline, rarely giving much thought to how they are constructed, and in the end struggled to understand the statistics that were then generated.

Workshop participants will read a brief article about learning objectives and multiple- choice questions prior to the workshop. Participants are then assigned to a team of 5-7 other faculty. They are asked to complete a 10-question Readiness Assurance Test based on the article. Then they proceed, using the TBL process, to develop skills in writing objectives and questions that are more meaningful and effective to the learner. The learning is through dialogue, debate, activity, and best-practice examples, not lecture.


By the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Compare and contrast meaningful learning objectives with ones that focus on only knowledge acquisition.

  • Identify key elements for an effective multiple-choice question.

  • Explain reliability, difficulty level, and discrimination factor in the context of good examination composition.

  • Explain how the ‘power of why’ in question writing generates so much learner engagement.
     



    Length of Workshop: 90 minutes
     

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