Cara North

Do your assessments measure content knowledge or deduction skills? This microlearning was created to help provide the "why" as to many multiple-choice test items can be guessed.

How many times have you ever "guessed" the correct answer on a multiple-choice test? Does that mean that you truly "know" something, or were you able to use deduction to guess the correct answer? For many educators, the scores their students receive on standardized tests impacts their effectiveness rating, regardless of what talents and passion they bring into their classrooms. Multiple-Choice Mayhem (MCM), the only gameshow where poorly written questions help you win big, was created in 2018 by Cara North and Sean Hickey at The Ohio State University's Center on Education and Training for Employment (CETE).
Many educators, despite needing formal degrees and licenses to teach, are not formally educated in assessment best practices. This rings even more true for many career-technical educators who often "fall" into teaching through their expertise in a vocation. MCM was created to help prove that if multiple-choice test items are written in a way that often violates best practice, that you can often guess the correct answer, despite having no content knowledge in the subject. To demonstrate that, questions were written poorly about facts from Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Cara conducted the needs assessment and created a persona for the Ohio career-technical educator. From speaking to educators across Ohio, Cara created the following learning objectives for the learning experience:

-Describe various pitfalls found in many multiple-choice items such as convergence, teaching in the stem, and absolutes.
-Analyze various items to select the correct answer without having prior knowledge of the content.

MCM was built in Articulate Storyline 2. The opening blends Gagne's fist instructional step of gaining attention with an element of personalization, allowing the user to input their name which will be used across the learning experience. The closed captions were added in via triggers since captioning in the player was not a native feature in Articulate Storyline at the time. MCM's impact includes increased recruiting efforts for a more diverse pool of educators to help write end of course exams for The Ohio Department of Education and increased educator confidence in guiding their students in what to expect (format and delivery) of standardized multiple-choice tests. MCM is an award-wining learning experience taking home Best of Show Non-Vendor from the Learning Guild's Learning Solutions Conference (2019) and also Learning Artifact of the year from AECT's Learner Engagement Division (2019).
You can play Multiple-Choice Mayhem by selecting the button below.