Teaching Hub

Can Multiple Choice Tests Promote Learning?

In “Multiple Choices,” a post on the blog Practicum: Critical Theory, Religion, and Pedagogy, Russell McCutcheon ponders how multiple choice tests facilitate learning in large introductory courses:

But what about the multiple choice tests? Well, like that definition assignment . . . it’s more about how they study for it and how they come to learn, over the course of the semester, that the key is building relationship between the terms, about being able to link one seemingly discrete piece of information to another and then to another . . . For, come to think about it, that’s what the course is all about: studying how we create knowledge, make spaces sensible and habitable, by establishing and then managing a host of relationships of similarity and difference—our field’s been known as comparative religion, after all, no? So the multiple test exemplifies the method at the heart of our discipline: comparison.

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