Revising and Improving Multiple Choice Questions with the NGSS DCIs in Mind

Revising and Improving Multiple Choice Questions with the NGSS DCIs in Mind

Presenters: Dr. Tingting Reid, Dr. Phil Sadler, Ms. Cynthia Crockett, Science Education Dept., Center for Astrophysics|Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA

Assessment questions are challenging to write to truly understand students’ knowledge. As part of a recent study, we asked science educators to revise existing middle-school physical science multiple-choice questions to help reduce problems such as gender/racial/ethnic bias, inappropriate difficulty (too easy or too hard), and poor discrimination (an indicator of overall test performance). We compared original and revised questions using psychometric analysis. We will present findings from this multi-year study on effective revisions of multiple-choice STEM questions.

Additionally, we invite middle school physical science educators to collaborate with us in the next phase of this work. We are interested in the assessment questions and tests they use with their students. We invite them to share their experience with assessment items as well as share particular tests or items that they use with students, especially multiple-choice questions.