One way to circumvent the messiness of open-ended interviews is to turn them into closed-ended, multiple-choice tests. As the critics would predict, children do exhibit less coherence on multiple-choice tests than in open-ended interviews. They select responses consistent with a spherical model of the earth on some questions but select responses consistent with a nonspherical model on others. This finding should not be a surprise, though. Children could easily provide correct answers to multiple-choice questions without understanding why those answers are correct. It’s long been known that multiple-choice questions are easier than fill-in-the-blank questions because the correct answer to a multiple-choice question is provided as part of the question itself; one need only recognize it. And children are surrounded by the correct answers every day. Their classrooms are filled with globes, not hollow spheres, and their textbooks are filled with photographs of a round earth, not an elliptical earth. Multiple-choice tests measure children’s memory for earth-related information but not their understanding of it
Multiple choice questions in our examinations might not help our children in understanding the concepts they are supposed to test. In this excerpt, children who go through the tests select answers that might be contradictory to each other, showing that they did not have a mental model of the shape of the earth.
Multiple choice questions ultimately just serves as a test of pattern recognition and memories and might not really test one’s ability to understand things as much as having to verbalise your thoughts on an open-ended question. While it might be easier to score or mark these tests, open-ended questions can help develop better critical thinking or mental modelling skills which are important for their future.
