Well, actually, not always. Multiple choice questions can be and often are used to judge reasoning and analytical skills, especially in fields such as mathematics and science. MCQs can be designed in such a way that comprehension is tested, not memorisation.

With that said, there are a number of subjects where the whole point is memorisation (History, among others), and for these, MCQ tests are by far the better option.

In addition, MCQs allow anyone to look at the same piece of work and mark it in exactly the same way. Essays do not have that property - they are inherantly subjective in their marking. This is not always such a bad thing - but if you are attempting to measure children's scholastic achievement, I would want to hope that you have some sort of objective measure, as opposed to one that is at the whim of the marker.

At any rate, there are many different levels of essay questions avaliable, and they all focus on different skills. Essays also have the unfortunate issue that due to the fact that they take long periods to write, you can't measure the breadth of knowledge in subjects that have lots of disparate areas of knowledge, which is something that MCQs and short-answer questions, due to their shorter response time, are more capable.

CaptPlatypus wrote



I have to disagree with you there. The tests that schools have to take have set subjects. they are mathematics, literary skills, and science knowledge. The teachers can just prepare their students for the tests ahead of time and such, so they don't have to teach as well a rounded ciriculum as you think. I should know, becuase at the two high schools I have been to both schools knew ahead of time what would be on the NCLB tests. I will try to find a source to support this when I have more time.

You don't know the exact questions on a test -- but you do know exactly what subjects are covered. And those are not the subjects that make up a good, diverse education.

And, memorization of facts is NOT anything like education. Rote memorization of facts gives you a sort of external, superficial knowledge of a subject. Like, you'll learn what year the Declaration of Independence was signed, but you won't understand everything that was going on in the country at the minds of the founding fathers at the time they signed it. Therefore, you won't actually know anything about the Declaration of Independence, you'll just be able to regurgitate "July 4, 1776".

This is not education.

I did the a-level history papers, Kea, and my marks ranged from 100% to 38%, without any real understanding of why one essay was much worse than the rest. And once you do know how to write essays, they become a test of your essay-writing ability, not depth of knowledge. I just got 68 on an essay written in one all-night stint about a subject for which I'd done no reading. Essays are still about teaching to the test, you just need to learn how to blag an essay rather than memorising a few key facts.

kirby - History is not about memorisation of facts -it's about analysis. Memorisation is pretty unimportant, given that most of history is tested outside exam conditions, and you can just look up the facts. Someone who knows every name and date involved with a historical subject could still quite easily fail history miserably, if they don't uinderstand it all.

NB. I don't do history

I have to disagree with some things in this thread. The problem with essay questions is not that they are a poor way the judge understanding, it is that they are impossible to score uniformly in a very large group. Since the goal of standardized testing is to arrive at a score that can be compared to other scores, subjectivity of grading renders essays essentially valueless. It’s not that they are bad questions; they just don’t lend themselves to standardization.

I have also come disagree with Bob about facts versus education. It has been common practice to try to teach problem solving, synthetic thinking and other high level skills rather than mere facts in education. It seems to be becoming increasing clear that, contrary to what you might think, this approach does not work well. Problem solving is not a teachable skill, it is the result of native ability, and more importantly, experience. Synthetic thinking, likewise isn’t teachable, it is an emergent quality that comes about once you have acquired sufficient facts to synthesize. Many of the qualities we value in a “good education” are the result of learning a sufficient number of facts, not the result of some deliberate effort to instill them.

Just in case you where thinking testing for quality in education was easy, our board of regents has started what they expect to be a year long project to define “quality education” before we can even move on to figuring out how to test for it accurately.

Thing is, Bode Darkly, facts crammed for an exam are quickly forgotten once you're walking out the door.

Being able to recite the presidents by year doesn't get you anything. Knowing the relevant issues of the period, how they were approached, and how they were received, is real education. Useful education.

The thing is teaching concepts, not facts. Facts are meaningless without a good conceptual context. And if concepts can't be tested with an A, B, C, or D answer? Maybe we shouldn't be giving standardized tests. They don't test intelligence, or how much you learned. They test your test taking ability and the amount of time and effort you put into memorization.

If you want to bore the hell out of kids so they drop out and walk away not remembering anything except a few major facts drilled into their heads, teach only facts and have multiple choice tests. If you want to educate them, give them the conceptual context behind those facts, let them learn some fo the subjects *they* want to learn instead of just the ones some beaurocrats decided they should learn, and give them the option of a vocational education they're interested in.

In fact, I bet, if you ran an experiment where a control group was given a fact-based education in lecture format, and an experimental group was given a concept-driven education in discussion format, and tested them both 6 months later....the fact based group would have barely retained anything, and the discussino-based group would have retained a whole lot.

Well, multiple choice questions for math aren't that much different from just giving kids problems to solve. Except when I drilled for the math SATs, I was taught ways to figure out which answer was most likely to be right without even doing the calculations.

Multiple test exams are much easier to grade (though I was once screwed over by a pencil that was too pale), and so are probably the only practical way to grade large national exams. But I believe that essays should be given for internal school assignments and tests. Learning to write clearly in full sentences and structured paragraphs with developed ideas is a skill that a lot of people are going to need after they leave school, even if it's only to write the company report or draft a coherent business letter.

As for facts vs analysis, the answer, as usual, is that you need both. You don't get much out of history the way they taught it in my parents' days. You just get a timeline, and memorize it. And I don't really understand the point of making third graders memorize all the state capitals and flowers. :P But if you slide too far in the other direction, you end up with people who don't have a grasp of basic geography and who just do the Black Death or The Nazis year after year in history, without ever being able to place things in a broader context.

Well, it's true, multiple choice is okay for mathematics and science. I mean for..history, english, etc.

And I think education ought to be more vocational and less academic. Like, the first things to be cut when the budget gets thin shouldn't necessarily be art, music, shop, and electives.

And it is also true that the facts are a good backdrop for the context and the concepts. But, I would assume that a child would naturally come across the facts in the process of discussion.

Edich Fromm said that the most important aspects of a child's early development are individuation, and affirmation within a community, which go hand in hand. If you teach a child not to suppress negative emotions, he will learn not to express them when it is appropriate or necessary. Similarly, if you teach a child not to fully explore a subject and think for himself, but rather only to absorb specific facts, that child will learn only to absorb facts and trivia and won't fully individuate his thinking process.

I agree.

I've long advocated a school system that only teaches the basics in each course, the stuff you'd need for everyday life, and leaves the advanced stuff (who uses calculus?) for vocational learning. If I want to be a writer, do I really need to know the atomic number of boron? No. Leave that to the chemists.

Now, this does raise the problem of getting a child to discover what his/her vocational interest is. That's why, in this school, part of each day would be "free time" in a library-type place that would have plenty of books and computers. Each student has to report five new (as in not reported before by them ever, and not reported by anyone that day) facts to a teacher at some point during the time. This encourages them to research different interesting things, which will lead to interests and career aspirations.

Sure, the system as I've described it has a few little problems, but it just needs some tweaking.

Kids are forced to choose their future careers too early as it is. Forcing them to choose early in high school will make the problem worse, not better. And if they choose poorly, they'll have to repeat high school, and many of them would choose poorly -- it's simply not fair to ask a 14-year-old to choose what they're going to do for the rest of their life.

Besides, for most people, any facts or skills you learn in high school aren't likely to be directly applicable to your future career. What's important are things like analytical ability and logical thinking that subjects like English and Math encourage you to develop.

But if you developed the skills you could apply to some job, it'd give you a starting point. The average adult changes careers 6 or 7 times in his or her lifetime. But it's better for a child to leave school with the tools to get a job that could lead to a self sufficient income, than for a child to leave school without any real world coping skills.

Montessouri schools all the way. Seriously. I tried to get into one when I was in 4th grade but the waiting list was too long. If/when I have kids, they're going Montessouri.

What are Montessouri schools?

Edited for grammer

BTS, I don’t entirely disagree with you. There has been a movement in higher education in the last few decades that, in your terms, would amount to teaching concepts without information. I feel that approach is even worse than the teaching facts with no context. I believe both facts and concepts are important, but I don’t like downplaying the facts in that equation. It is a fallacy that high level concepts can be taught in a vacuum. Facts are what give you the background and references to understand the connections between things. I am not advocating rote memorization or dry lectures; just that information is what education is about.

I was taught math the old fashioned way. We covered each concept in (boring) depth and did countless problems. My nephews are learning math the new way. They are given specific problems and then study any principle of math that may touch on that particular problem. The first is mostly facts, and I must admit, rather boring. The second is all about problem solving and context. (Still boring, and never addresses any single area in depth.) I may have enjoyed math less than my nephews, but I know it much better.

Well, you don't have to be totally unstructured to teach concepts.

You can go concept by concept without forcing children to memorize that ab and ba is the commutative property of multiplication. You teach them that reversing the terms of a multiplication problem won't change the result, so in proofs, they can do that whenever they want.

But you don't make them match 'commutative rule of multiplication' to 'ab = ba', and you don't make them write out 'commutative rule of multiplication'.

And besides, I'm arguing that having conceptual discussions, especially in the humanities, will give children a better memory for facts than dry lecture style.

When you just teach the facts in math, though, you tend to get students who can only solve problems that they've seen before. I don't think that you can say that you know math unless you're able to apply what you've learned to new problems that you've never seen before. The facts are important, but in the real world, you can always look up facts when you need them. In my admittedly limited experience, I find it to be far more useful to know concepts than facts.



I just don't think that it's possible for a high school to teach most students what they need to know in their future career. I repeat myself, but it's not reasonale to ask a 15-year-old to decide what they're going to do for the next 50 years. The vast majority of them simply will not be able to make a good decision at that point of their lives. Another problem is simple logistics. A high school cannot teach to all possible careers. There are thousands of careers today. High schools could specialize, like universities and colleges do, but then students would be forced to live far away from their family and friends to attend school, and I don't think that's appropriate for most kids of that age.