In last week’s blog post identifying 11 teaching technique alternatives to Socratic-style questions and lectures, I promised that, among other things, I would create a post that explores teaching using multiple choice questions. This post explores four such uses, but I start with a recommendation.
How Students Should Communicate Their Answers. Regardless of which of the four uses you implement, you need to have created a mechanism for students to communicate their answers. I prefer to be able to quickly scan the room in my in-person classes and get a sense of what percentage of students answered correctly and identify a few students I can call on who answered differently. I therefore have made and given to each student a laminated set of two 5” X 7” cards, one with A on one side and B on the other side and one with C on one side and D on the other side. (Each letter is on a different color background.) Other faculty prefer phone-based electronic response systems, such as iClicker and PollEverywhere because they generate data. Finally, colleagues who teach online synchronous classes use one of the above-referenced response systems or the response system built into the video conferencing tool, such as Zoom or Teams, that they use, or just ask each student to type A, B, C or D into the chat.
Reading Assignment Assessments. If you wish to make sure that your students have learned key aspects of their assigned reading, perhaps because you want to use class time to focus on higher-order skills, you can require students to answer a series of multiple-choice questions assessing their comprehension. Sometimes called “entrance tickets,” these assessments allow you to tailor your instruction to students’ areas of greatest confusion. It is important that you ask the questions, require each student to commit to an answer to each, and explain why the correct answers are correct. Doing so gives the students who answered incorrectly a second bite at the learning apple and makes it more likely that nearly all students have the foundation you are seeking.
Post-Class Learning Assessments. In this context, the multiple-choice questions function as classroom assessment techniques, A.K.A. exit tickets. They allow you to assess whether the students have learned from the class session what you hoped they had learned. Because these occur at the end of class, you will need to close the loop with students by providing the correct answers via email, in a post to your course webpage, or in the next class session.
Discussion Seeds. Short opinion polls regarding issues about which students (and lawyers) can reasonably disagree can help students understand that they really do see things differently and there is often more than one credible view on a legal topic. Obviously, there is no correct answer to such questions, although two of the answers may be better than the other two answers. Students seeing that their peers are split on an issue can have two positive effects. First, it will help avoid the anchoring effect where the first student’s response constrains their peer’s willingness to offer alternative views. Second, it will give less confident students a sense that they are not alone in seeing things the way they see them. For these questions, for which I often only give students two choices, phone-based electronic response systems are the best way to go. The A-B and C-D cards are often not all held up at the same time causing students to adjust their choices based on their peers’ or friends’ choices.
Teaching Entire New Doctrine. Every once in a while, in an upper division class, I deliberately do not assign readings relating to a doctrinal point I want student to learn. Instead, I ask my students to work in teams to answer a series of two or three questions. I am explicit about the fact that I have not had them read anything about the doctrine nor taught them the doctrine. I also always have the students work in teams to choose answers so they feel less out on a limb. Once the students have guessed, I teach the doctrine by working with the students to infer the doctrine that explains why the correct answers are correct. In many such instances, I have teams compete to win trivial prizes for getting the most answers correct. Students report enjoying this experience, and it draws on what is called the “pre-testing effect,” the idea that students learn material more deeply when they are tested on it before they have learned it even if they have answered the questions incorrectly. See Yerak Mera, Nataliya Dianova, and Eugenia Marin-Garcia, The Pretesting Effect: Exploring the Impact of Feedback and Final Test Timing, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12292081/.
