The recent pandemic caused a brutal upheaval in approaches to learning and teaching and our ability and capacity, in adverse circumstances, to engage with students. There may be silver linings emanating from lessons learnt by us, as educators, when forced to make abrupt changes or rethink, with little notice, our teaching approaches and preferences, which may be long-held and ingrained. Assessment and the protection of academic integrity have always been thorny and controversial issues, but even more so during a pandemic. This talk focuses on contrasting roles taken by multiple-choice questions and aims to tease out important underlying principles in using them for formative and summative assessment tasks, separately and in combination. Functionality may change, depending on whether the learning environment is synchronous (in-person, face-to-face) or asynchronous (online, typically remote, using a learning management system). A variety of examples will be presented. If there is time, connections may be made to models of learning, such as constructive alignment and the role of SOLO (Biggs, 2003), the theory of threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2005) and navigation of liminal space (Cousins 2006), and ways and means of engaging students and moving them through the passive-active interface (Easdown, 2007).

Biggs, J. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd ed.). Berkshire: Open University Press.

Cousin, G. (2006). An introduction to threshold concepts. Planet, 4-5.

Easdown, D. (2007) The importance of true-false statements in mathematics teaching and learning. UniServe Science Teaching and Learning Research Proceedings, 164-167

Meyer, J. H. F. & Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education 49(3), 373-388.