Multiple-Choice Item Distractor Development Using Topic Modeling Approaches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writing a high-quality, multiple-choice test item is a complex process. Creating plausible but incorrect options for each item poses significant challenges for the content specialist because this task is often undertaken without implementing a systematic method. In the current study, we describe and demonstrate a systematic method for creating plausible but incorrect options, also called distractors, based on students' misconceptions. These misconceptions are extracted from the labeled written responses. One thousand five hundred and fifteen written responses from an existing constructed-response item in Biology from Grade 10 students were used to demonstrate the method. Using a topic modeling procedure commonly used with machine learning and natural language processing called latent dirichlet allocation, 22 plausible misconceptions from students' written responses were identified and used to produce a list of plausible distractors based on students' responses. These distractors, in turn, were used as part of new multiple-choice items. Implications for item development are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.203 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".