Processing MC Question Components to Support Text-Based Reading & Discussion

March 4, 2019

By: Maggie Lopez @meg_lopez0

The multiple choice section of the AP Literature and AP Language exams prove to be difficult--both for students and teachers, as no one wants to practice the skills demanded by taking practice tests over and over again.

One way to help students develop the close reading and critical thinking skills needed to address the range and variety of challenging excerpts on the exam is by breaking down the process of the test-taking in steps within peer groups in what I call “Reverse Multiple Choice.”

Although the process takes a bit of planning and sometimes typing on our end, the exercise positively impacts students. In summary, students are grouped and given each part of a multiple choice selection--the passage, the question stems, and the answer sets--one at a time, then asked to answer the questions after a lot of process thinking.

Here are the steps as you would implement them in your classroom (please note the time required will be determined by your students or your expectations of how quickly they are to work, the times provided are just suggestions and will differ with the text):

1. Group students into clusters of 2-4 with their desks circled.
2. Distribute a multiple choice passage and ask students to independently read and annotate as they would on the exam (7-9 minutes).
3. Once completed, ask students to chat about the gist of the passage in their groups, allowing time for questions and clarifications (2 minutes).
4. Pass out the passage’s Question Stems, without answers, in a random order. Invite students to work through the questions as a group, referring back to the reading and writing what they believe the answer is as if they were open-ended questions. Some questions may require students to think in reverse (i.e., students may list what elements are present if the question stem asks “Which is NOT present...” or a similar variation), but all questions will get students talking about their thinking (10-15 minutes).
5. Once completed, pass out the Answer Selections, again in jumbled order, and ask students to pair the appropriate Question Stem and Answer Set together. I like to use numbers for the Question Stems (step 4) and letters for the Answer Sets (step 5), so students know to pair a letter to a number (3-5 minutes).
6. If you’d like, you may check that student groups paired the Question Stems and Answer Sets correctly before distributing the full question set for the passage. Students then, using all of their thinking and notes, work together to answer the multiple choice questions (8-10 minutes).
7. In whatever manner you’d like, reveal the correct answers. I have found students want to understand questions they missed and other student groups can often explain the thinking that led their group to the right answer.

Students love working together to break the monotony of practice selections as this becomes about thinking and talking with one another while still developing the thought patterns necessary for working through passages on the exam. Here is a sample of the process using the 50 Essays Multiple Choice for “Letters from a Birmingham Jail.”