Comparing comprehension measured by multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Text comprehension is crucial for learning and knowledge acquisition.
• Assessing comprehension effectively requires understanding the underlying cognitive processes.
• Different question formats may tap into distinct cognitive mechanisms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare how open-ended and multiple-choice questions measure text comprehension.
• To investigate the relationship between self-explanations, prior knowledge, and question formats.
• To explore the implications for dual process theories of text comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Participants read a text and explained preselected sentences.
• Participants answered both open-ended and multiple-choice questions based on the text.
• Performance was analyzed in relation to self-explanation quality and prior knowledge.

Main Results:

• Performance on open-ended questions correlated with self-explanation quality.
• Performance on multiple-choice questions correlated with prior knowledge.
• The two question formats appear to measure different aspects of comprehension.

Conclusions:

• Open-ended questions may better reflect deeper processing and understanding.
• Multiple-choice questions might be more influenced by existing knowledge than by text processing.
• Findings support dual process theories in explaining comprehension differences.