College students in a lower-division psychology course made metacognitive judgments by predicting and postdicting performance for true-false, multiple-choice, and fill-in-the-blank question sets on each of three exams. This study investigated which question format would result in the most accurate metacognitive judgments. Extending Koriat's (1997)…

Research has suggested that changing one's answer on multiple-choice examinations is more likely to lead to positive academic outcomes. This study aimed to further understand the relationship between changing answer selections and item attributes, student performance, and time within a population of 158 first-year medical students enrolled in a…

Several recent studies have employed item response theory (IRT) to rank incorrect responses to commonly used research-based multiple-choice assessments. These studies use Bock's nominal response model (NRM) for applying IRT to categorical (nondichotomous) data, but the response rankings only utilize half of the parameters estimated by the model.…

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used in undergraduate introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, and substantial evidence supports the use of student-created questions to promote learning. However, research on student-created MCQ exams as an assessment method is more limited, and no studies have…

There is a broad literature in multiple-choice test development, both in terms of item-writing guidelines, and psychometric functionality as a measurement tool. However, most of the published literature concerns multiple-choice testing in the context of expert-designed high-stakes standardized assessments, with little attention being paid to the…

The current study investigated the impact of manipulating reading strategy, reading the questions first (QF) or the passage first (PF), during a reading comprehension test, and we explored how reading strategy was related to student characteristics. Participants' eye movements were monitored as they read 12 passages and answered multiple-choice…

Item response theory (IRT) is a popular method to infer student abilities and item difficulties from observed test responses. However, IRT struggles with two challenges: How to map items to skills if multiple skills are present? And how to infer the ability of new students that have not been part of the training data? Inspired by recent advances…

In the frame of national Italian standardized assessments in mathematics, a didactic phenomenon has been observed concerning students' behaviour when answering an item: students are inclined towards not accepting an output which is not clearly recognizable with something distinct from the starting inputs. The observed effect seems to originate…

The current study explores the impact of varying multiple-choice question preview and presentation formats in a test of second language listening proficiency targeting different levels of text comprehension. In a between-participant design, participants completed a 30-item test of listening comprehension featuring implicit and explicit information…

While generating multiple-choice questions has been shown to promote deep learning, students often fail to realize this benefit and do not willingly participate in this activity. Additionally, the quality of the student-generated questions may be influenced by both their level of engagement and familiarity with the learning materials. Towards…

Following Richards's (2015) ideas of using movie clips, videos, and games as valuable technological tools for language learning, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using novel extracts and computer game cutscenes based on the same story to develop the vocabulary knowledge of English as a foreign language (EFL)…

The aim of the present study is two-fold. First, it uses eye-tracking to investigate the dynamics of item reading, both in multiple choice and matching items, before and during two hearings of listening passages in a computerized while-listening performance (WLP) test. Second, it investigates answer changing during the two hearings, which include…

The main objective of the article is to compare several methods of evaluating multiple-choice options through classical item analysis. The methods subjected to examination include the tabulation of choice distribution, the interpretation of trace lines, the point-biserial correlation, the categorical analysis of trace lines, and the investigation…

The current study sought to examine the validity of a General English Achievement Test (GEAT), administered to university students in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year, by hybridizing differential information (DIF) and differential distractor function (DDF) analytical models. Using a purposive sampling method, from the target population…

In multiple-choice tests, the quality of distractors may be more important than their number. We therefore examined the joint influence of distractor quality and quantity on test functioning by providing a sample of 5,793 participants with five parallel test sets consisting of items that differed in the number and quality of distractors.…