Let's say C is correct.
So what we have to do IS we have to give plausible answers to A, B, and D, okay?
One of those plausible answers has to be pretty close to the C, and these
ones that are close to the C, the correct answer, are called distractor items.
They're actually designed to trick you.
They're actually designed to lead you into the wrong answer because it seems right.
Right, so the funny thing is about select response assessment is, it's a game.
You know you might say yes is the correct answer.
You learn or you can be taught methods of approximation and
methods of process of elimination.
Working out what the trick is in the distractor item.
They were actually, it's a game.
It's a technical thing to learn how to do a select response assessment.
And one of the problems with select response assessments is
in the world it isn't always the case that sees right from one perspective.
One of the other things might be right, and
your incorrect answers might have a certain logic to them.
Or your correct answer may be an accident or a mistake, or
based on faulty reasoning.
What do we do?
We have to have quite a few questions before we can eliminate
those kinds of vagaries in a test, and hopefully by the time we've done that
scoring across all the questions, we've got a reasonable kind of score.
And then there's a whole lot of mathematical voodoo,
statistical voodoo that we do to compare items across different groups.
And hopefully we try and make the test half reasonable and half fair.
One of the things about it, though,
is that it involves a kind of indirect set of influences about my thinking.
So I've got these questions, and it doesn't,
the questions don't really say that I understand the logic of science or
the logic of math or the logic of literacy.
They don't really tell us that we, what it's about,
it's about creating statistical inferences from those, from that reality.
And in fact there's a whole science who has a lot
response theory, which tries to calibrate this process and
ensure the inferences of, are more or less half correct.
Now, let's think about what we do with reading
reading is essentially accessible via select response assessment.
It's the main form of assessment for reading.
And it's essentially about reading comprehension.
And with select response assessment come a whole lot of assumptions.
Firstly, if I'm reading a novel,
the really relevant question is, you know, which characters do you relate to and why.
But in fact, the kind of questions I can ask about that novel in a select response
assessment, are not interpretive because interpretations is variable
in terms of who the person is.
There are often things which are factual,
there are often things which are empirical details, which often not central.
In fact, so not central that often to answer some of these questions in
a comprehension test you've gotta go back to the text and look it up.
Because there may have been details that you didn't notice,
which do in fact have a correct or an incorrect answer.
And one of the tragedies of the assessment fetish that we've had over the last
couple of decades of assessment obsession,
