0HOW CAN WE CONSTRUCT GOOD MULTIPLE-CHOICE ITEMS?

The multiple-choice (MC) item is one of the most popular item formats used in educational assessment. A typical MC item has three parts: a stem that presents a problem; the correct or best answer; and several distractors (i.e., the wrong or less appropriate options). MC items can be constructed to assess a variety of learning outcomes, from simple recall of facts to Bloom’s highest taxonomic level of cognitive skills – evaluation (Osterlind, 1998). It is common knowledge that the correct answers should be distributed evenly among the alternative positions of MC items, but there are many other important guidelines for writing good items. For example, Haladyna (1999) describes 30 guidelines for writing MC items. Space limitation precludes a discussion of all these guidelines here. We focus on eight guidelines that we believe are generally not well recognized by chemistry teachers in Hong Kong. Illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate how these guidelines can be applied to construct chemistry items. Guidelines for Constructing MC Items 1. The stem should be meaningful by itself and should present a definite problem. A common fault in MC item writing is to have a brief, meaningless stem with problem definition revealed in the options. In such cases, it can be difficult to see the intent of the item after reading the stem. To write a focused item, we should include the central idea in the stem instead of the options. In Item 1, the stem does not present a definite problem