One-Best-Answer Questions: Clickers, Critical Thinking, and Legal Education
One thing I love about this example from Ed Cheng is that he turns the expectations students have for multiple-choice questions on their head. Students expect that such a question will have a single correct answer, and the fact that Ed's third question doesn't have one creates a useful "time for telling" moment for his students.
Ed described the series of questions as “review” questions, used at the beginning of one week to review material from the previous week. He starts with the following question, which he describes as a “gimme” question:
Carl keeps a pet rhinoceros within a double electrified fence. A severe storm knocks out power, and the frightened rhino breaks through the fence, rampaging through the neighborhood and ramming Jodi’s car. In an action against Carl, Jodi may recover:
- Full damages because Carl converted Jodi’s property
- Full damages because trespass to chattels only requires substantial damages
- Full damages because the rhino is a wild animal
- Nothing, because Carl was not negligent
This was apparently an easy question for Ed’s students, since 100% of them chose the correct answer (C). Notably, this question has a single correct answer.