{"id":283,"date":"2019-09-13T06:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-09-13T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/?p=283"},"modified":"2019-09-12T14:39:13","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T22:39:13","slug":"why-have-students-answer-questions-when-they-can-write-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/why-have-students-answer-questions-when-they-can-write-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Why have students answer questions when they can write them?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This blog post was originally posted by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani on his website blog found here: http:\/\/thatpsychprof.com\/why-have-students-answer-questions-when-they-can-write-them\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many thanks to Rajiv for allowing us to share his words!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently trialled a new assignment in my Social Psychology class: \nDuring each of the 10 weeks when there was no scheduled exam I asked my \nstudents to write multiple-choice questions. That\u2019s right, they wrote<\/em> questions instead of merely answering them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a pedagogical perspective, I really wanted my students to \nachieve a deeper level of understanding (e.g., the level it takes in \norder to craft three plausible distractors). However, this assignment \nalso served a pragmatic purpose in that the open textbook that I use for this course<\/a>\n (and that I helped revise) does not yet have a readymade question bank.\n  By asking my students to craft and peer-review multiple-choice \nquestions based on the concepts covered that week (and scaffolding this \nprocess over the semester), I considered I had a budding open pedagogy<\/a> project on my hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s how it went:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. The students were asked to write 4 questions each week, 2 factual \n(e.g., a definition or evidence-based prediction) and 2 applied (e.g., \nscenario-type).<\/li>
  2. For the first two weeks they wrote just one plausible distractor (I \nprovided the question stem, the correct answer, and 2 plausible \ndistractors). They also peer reviewed questions written by 3 of their \n(randomly assigned) peers. This entire procedure was double blind and \nperformed using Google forms for the submission and Google sheets for \nthe peer review.<\/li>
  3. For the next two weeks they wrote two plausible distractors (the rest of the procedure was the same).<\/li>
  4. For the next two weeks they wrote all 3 plausible distractors (the rest of the procedure was the same).<\/li>
  5. For the remainder of the semester they wrote the stem, the correct answer, and all the distractors.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I adapted existing guidelines about how to write effective \nmultiple-choice distractors and how to provide constructive peer \nfeedback and produced these two brief guides:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Guidelines for writing effective distractors for multiple-choice questions<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Guidelines for providing constructive peer feedback<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The result? My small class of 35 students wrote 1400 questions in the\n span of 10 weeks! And although I wouldn\u2019t consider this a polished \nquestion bank ready for use by other instructors, I still consider this \nassignment to have been a success because the questions steadily \nimproved over the semester (the experience of serving as peer reviewers \nwas especially useful to the students when constructing their own \nquestions). The students were also buoyed and motivated by my practice \nof including a few of their best questions on each of the three course \nexams. Looking forward, I plan to have my next cohort of Social \nPsychology students revise and add to this bank. I figure that it will \ntake only a couple of semesters for us to provide the commons with a \nhigh-quality question bank, something that will enable even more \ninstructors to adopt this open textbook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This blog post was originally posted by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani on his website blog found here: http:\/\/thatpsychprof.com\/why-have-students-answer-questions-when-they-can-write-them\/ Many thanks to Rajiv for allowing us to share his words! I recently trialled a new assignment in my Social Psychology class: During each of the 10 weeks when there was no scheduled exam I asked my students to write multiple-choice…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","iawp_total_views":20,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[65,59,45,64],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-pedagogy","tag-assignments","tag-education","tag-higher-ed","tag-questions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}