This was designed for AP Lit, but the frame works for any multiple choice activity.
I get tired of just plain old individualized reading passages with multiple choice questions (though there is a place for that). Since my class is already in teams for a class game of Survivor, I decided to let them complete this in their teams (though you can just put them into groups).
Group work for multiple choice is a great idea as long as your groups with talk amongst themselves. This way they explain why they thought it was A or C or whatever and bounce their ideas off one another. This sharing of why they think one answer is better than another helps them to develop strategies to better break down these answer choices. Each person in the group notices different things about the passage, questions, and answer choices.
I had two passages with a total of 23 questions that I got from a test prep workbook. I chose one poem and one prose. I drew this expertly I-could-have-been-an-art-teacher grid on the board:
I then printed out letter choices for each team. The template I made gave me 5 of each letter A-E (I know AP Lit doesn't use E anymore, but my older passages were made before this change). Just to be mean, once they were in their groups and got their bag of 25 letter choices, I made them pick any two to discard (they only need 23 answers, after all). I know this could result in them not being able to answer a question correctly, but they will know what they wanted the answer to be. I did make sure that to start with, each group had enough letter choices to get all the questions correct. It then depended on which two they discarded. No need for you to redesign the wheel if you want to do something similar - here are the letters ready to be printed.
Once they had time to work out their best answers, they started taping the answers to the board. They could have put their answers up at any moment, but none of them wanted to let the other groups know what they thought the answer could be. So we ended up with this chaotic attack upon the board.
We went through the answers and circled the correct ones on the board. For any the class had questions about, we took the time to break it down together. All in all, the whole thing took about an hour and twenty minutes. They did a lot of discussion and if they found that they did not have enough letter answer choices for what they thought was needed, they had to start weighing how much confidence they had in each to pick the ones worthy enough of the number of Bs they had.
How it ended:
For our game purposes, each group got 25 points for each correct answer. Fun for MC Monday!
If you have an alternative way of assessing multiple choice or you tried this and made alterations to it, let me know either in the comments or in an email.
Want more? Here are some other alternative ways to tackle Multiple Choice Mondays:
- Speed Training
- Reverse Process of Elimination
- Race Horse MC (borrowed this idea from elsewhere)
If you made it this far into the article, say hi in the comments! :)
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