Activating prior knowledge using multiple-choice question distractors

A student's academic success in graduate and professional school may depend on prior knowledge. However, these students may not see important and necessary material for extended periods of time between their pre-requisites and their new course work. As such, they are more prone to being unable to access available information from memory when needed. This study investigated the use of multiple-choice (MC) question examinations in stabilising or reactivating these students' memories for material that is available in their memories, but currently inaccessible due to disuse.

A total of 156 incoming first-year student-pharmacists were recruited. These student-pharmacists completed a baseline examination on physiology prior to coursework. This assessment contained fill-in-the-blank (FIB) questions followed by MC versions of the FIB questions. In the experimental sets, 10 questions had MC distractor answers that were answers to a future FIB question; in the other condition, the MC distractors were not answers to future FIB questions. The primary outcome was performance on future or target FIB questions in the context of whether the prior or priming MC questions contained the answer within the distractors.

Performance on target FIB questions improved when the distractors in the MC questions contained the relevant answer (29%) compared to when the distractors did not contain the correct answer (18%) (P < .001, d = 0.78). When students could not generate a correct response to the FIB question, the experimental condition outperforming the control condition (17% vs 30%, d = 0.76).

Multiple-choice questions that contained a correct response as a distractor to a future question, improved student performance. As such, the use of MC may be an inexpensive way to reactivate prior knowledge, especially knowledge that has become inaccessible due to disuse.