Abstract—This study, based on a case study research design,
aimed to identify Taiwanese elementary students’ difficulties in
the process of generating multiple-choice items in the subject of
social studies. Six sixth grade pupils with different achievement
levels were recruited to participate for the entire 2015 school
year. Each participant was required to pose two multiple-choice
items in 20 minutes in class after the teacher finished teaching
each social studies unit (24 units in total). Data collection
methods included participant observations, document analysis
of student-generated questions, and individual face-to-face
interviews. The qualitative data analysis method was adopted
for inducing convergent themes. Four main themes emerged
related to the difficulties in student question-generation: finding
appropriate content and the main ideas of the study material to
construct questions on, completing the specified number of
questions with options of adequate quality, formulating
linguistically appropriate question stems, and constructing
questions that involve higher-order cognitive levels. Based on
the findings obtained from this study, explicit pedagogical
suggestions regarding supports to help mitigate the difficulties
that students encountered during student question-generation
are provided, with their applicability to other larger contexts
attended to.
Index Terms—Experienced difficulties, elementary students,
student question-generation, social studies teaching,
multiple-choice items.
Chih-Wei Kuo and Fu-Yun Yu are with the Institute of Education,
National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan (e-mail:
louielucky@hotmail.com, fuyun.ncku@gmail.com).
Cite: Chih-Wei Kuo and Fu-Yun Yu, "Difficulties of Multiple-choice Question-Generation Encountered by Elementary Students in Social Studies: A Case Study," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 259-266, 2018.