Retrieval practice improves meaningful learning, and the most frequent way of implementing retrieval practice in classrooms is to have students answer questions. In four experiments (N=372) we investigated the effects of different question formats on learning. Students read educational texts and practised retrieval by answering short-answer, multiple-choice, or hybrid questions. In hybrid condi...

Competition is an integrated part of most civilizations, from sports to education. Often competition arise whether or not it was intended and higher education is no exception from this. Should teachers acknowledge this and try to introduce competition as a part of the course or should they try to prevent competition, even spontaneously arisen competition? In this paper an overview of effects of...

Traditional multiple-choice quizzes do not tell us how confident the students are in their answers. To provide this additional information, researchers have proposed “fuzzy” multiple-choice quizzes, in which a student explicitly describes his/her degree of confidence in each possible answer. The idea is reasonable, but, as we show, the current grading scheme for such quizzes discourages student...

A standard correction for random guessing on multiple-choice examinations was examined retrospectively in an oral and maxillofacial pathology course for second-year dental students. The correction was a weighting formula for points awarded for correct answers, incorrect answers, and unanswered questions such that the expected value of the increase in test score due to guessing was zero. We comp...