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Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology

New journal article in Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment published

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Ludewig, U., Schwerter, J., & McElvany, N. (2023). The Features of Plausible but Incorrect Options: Distractor Plausibility in Synonym-Based Vocabulary Tests. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment. doi.org/10.1177/07342829231167892

Everyone who has worked on a multiple-choice (MC) test in their life knows that the wrong options make the tasks difficult in the first place. A better understanding of how distractor features affect the plausibility of distractors is therefore essential for the construction of efficient MC tasks in educational research. The article by Ulrich Ludewig, Jakob Schwerter, and Nele McElvany on “The features of plausible but incorrect options: distractor plausibility in synonym-based vocabulary tests” therefore investigated which features the incorrect options in an MC test must have in order for the tasks to query the vocabulary of fourth grade elementary school children well. In this context, the plausibility of distractors has a major impact on the psychometric properties of MC tasks. The analysis used the nominal category model to examine the selection of response options by fourth graders (N = 924) on an MC vocabulary test. The researchers used principles from cognitive psychology to identify relevant option features that capture the potential for the option to distract students from the correct answer. The results show that only a few option characteristics explain option choice behavior to a large extent. Options with distracting features (i.e., semantic relations and orthographic similarity) increase task difficulty and discriminability, whereas options that are less synonymous than the correct answer decrease task discriminability. Implications for the interpretation of test results and guidelines for item construction are presented in the article.