comprehension

This three-part white paper explores some possibilities and ideas in creating multiple choice questions (MCQs). In Part II, we look at:

• The types of knowledge (by Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives) that you can test for using MCQs
• How to create MCQs for each of the types of knowledge

In military instructional institutions around the world, it is customary to begin lessons with a couple of minutes of jokes. This is done with military precision, so it might or might not have the desired effect of lightening up the audience — but the principle holds. You’ve probably come across instructors who spend a few minutes saying something goofy, cracking a couple of jokes, and then proceeding with the lecture. Why do they do it at all?

While memory has been a topic of research and speculation for centuries, good educators have long known — from experience — how to improve recall. It is relatively easy to think about the material being presented, to analyse it, and to comprehend it. It is more difficult to recall it, and it is even more difficult to make the recall last months or years.

If you’ve properly viewed an autostereogram, you know that it can be hard to get the picture — literally. An autostereogram is an image that, at first sight, looks like random dots or pattern sequence (click to view original image at instructables.com):

What makes traditional, pre-1990s books so different from today’s popular books and e-books? To generalise somewhat, the presentation differs in almost every way: Paragraph structure, bulleted lists, visual elements, boxed islands of information, and so forth.