stepwise MCQs
Did you know about stepwise MCQs?
I’d never heard of it before reading this article entitled One simple tweak to maximise your multiple-choice quizzes. Of course, it immediately caught my attention, and here’s a very short definition:
In essence, stepwise multiple-choice questions are a simple yet powerful tool to foster deeper understanding and improve recall among learners. By encouraging students to retrieve information from memory before seeing potential answers, they turn passive learning into an active process, leading to better educational outcomes.
So it’s simply a question and answer format. But instead of immediately presenting the possible answers, the students are first asked to think for a few seconds and remember the possible answers, and then only the answers to be chosen are displayed.
This method, we are told in the article, is based on the technique called the retrieval practice, and is backed up by research demonstrating its effectiveness. It goes without saying that I absolutely have to try this method, and that with a bit of AI, it’s easy to produce numerous evaluations, as well as the necessary feedback to explain why a particular answer is wrong.
