Presenting People with Choices:: the Effect of Format on the Comprehension of Examination Rubrics

• Autores: Patricia Wright
• Localización: Innovations in education and teaching international, ISSN 1470-3297, Vol. 12, Nº 2, 1975, págs. 109-114
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This investigation compared five ways of expressing information about the choice of questions to be made from different sections of a test paper. It was found that linguistic constructions often thought to be difficult because of their negative elements (e.g. “ Answer not more than two questions from any one section “; or “Answer at least two questions from each section “) gave better performance than a table listing all the permissible combinations of questions. However, performance with the table was better than when the choices were given by a “ logical tree “ algorithm. When all constraints on selection of questions were removed, except for specifying the total number to be done, performance was faster but more error‐prone than with sentences such as those shown above. These results raise doubts about psycholinguistic notions of sentence difficulty.