Developing Multiple Choice Tests: Tips & Techniques

Item writing is a major responsibility of trainers. Too often, qualified staff who prepare lessons carefully and teach conscientiously use inadequate tests that do not validly reflect the true level of trainee achievement. This monograph describes techniques for constructing multiple-choice items that measure student performance accurately. It includes suggestions for writing test instructions, item stems, and distracters, and describes how to avoid giving grammatical clues by presenting "good" and "bad" examples. It includes a brief discussion of validity, reliability, item analysis, weighting scores, instructional taxonomies, and procedures to use in pretest-posttest score analysis. (Contains 3 figures.) [Funding is provided by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.]