Book Review: Developing Multiple-Choice Tests

Hey kids! Do you like writing multiple choice test items that exhibit desirable psychometric properties? You DO? Then Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items by Thomas Haladyna is for you!

Glibness aside, I actually did find this to be a pretty useful book and it’ll be kept within easy reach as a reference book in my office. I picked it up because I was developing a high stakes, multiple-choice test for a work project and wanted to make sure I was doing things right and covering all the bases. I generated double fist fulls of these kinds of tests when I taught undergraduate classes at the University of Missouri, but apparently I and everyone else going all the way back to my grade school was doing it ALL WRONG. Or at best not as well as we could have been.

What I like about Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items is that it picks a focus and sticks with it. After some obligatory introductory philosophizing, the book walks you through the various multiple choice item formats (of which there are way more than I realized), then moved on to how to actually generate the items and how to check over them to make sure they’re valid for whatever use you have in mind. The work is replete with practical “how to” kinds of advice in the forms of rules, check lists, and examples of good/bad items. Only occasionally does the author veer off into naval gazing and discussions that seemed a little pedantic to me, such as providing 3 answer choices to each question instead of 4. But most of those asides were self-contained and easy to skim, so it worked out fine.

This isn’t to say that writing these kinds of items is easy. In fact once I sat down and actually started trying to churn them out I found that it’s actually very HARD to do if you do it right. Creating believable but still objectively wrong answers to put in there with the right answer is actually the hardest part. But in the end, I was able to take what was in this work and with just a little additional research put together a training program for test item writers that I felt would give them (and me) the groundwork necessary to create a good test out of nothing.