A new approach for uncovering student resources with multiple-choice questions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multiple-choice assessment method where students generate explanations for each option, revealing diverse reasoning and uncovering alternative ideas that can inform physics instruction.

Contribution

The study presents a new approach to assess student understanding by capturing multiple explanations per question, revealing diverse student reasoning not accessible through traditional methods.

Findings

Students often generate correct explanations for wrong answers.

Incorrect explanations frequently include elements of correct physics reasoning.

The approach uncovers a broader range of student ideas for instructional use.

Abstract

The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to students. We use a new approach, asking students to generate a plausible explanation for every choice of a multiple-choice question, to capture a range of explanations that students can generate in answering physics questions. Asking 16 students to provide explanations in this way revealed alternative possibilities for student thinking that would not have been captured if they only provided one solution. The findings show two ways these alternatives can be productive for learning physics: (i) even students who ultimately chose the wrong answer could often generate the correct explanation and (ii) many incorrect explanations contained elements of correct physical reasoning. We discuss the instructional implications of this multiple-choice questioning approach and of student alternative ideas.