{"id":1419,"date":"2020-01-07T17:03:49","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T17:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/?p=1419"},"modified":"2020-01-07T17:07:59","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T17:07:59","slug":"how-many-options-in-branching-scenario-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/how-many-options-in-branching-scenario-decisions\/","title":{"rendered":"How many options in branching scenario decisions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christy Tucker has been blogging about creating blogging scenarios lately, the most recent of which is\u00a0How many options in branching scenario decisions<\/em><\/a>? The framing of this post closely relates the number of alternatives presented in basic multiple choice questions to how many decisions are available in branching scenarios. In case you missed this post making the rounds<\/a>, Patti Shank recently highlights a meta-analysis from 2005 showing the providing test writers 3 alternatives in an MCQ has the same validity and reliability as those with 4 or more, and frees up time and energy for test creators to come up with more\/better questions. Making this comparison has problems though, which Christy mentions “However, this research was about more traditional multiple choice questions, not branching scenarios. Research findings don\u2019t always apply consistently when you change the context, so some caution is warranted.” So what is one to do then?<\/p>\n

I’ve found that often these shorthand “rules” for creating learning materials do more harm than good. The number of times I’ve had to discuss with an SME the number of alternatives that should be in MCQs (five has been super common lately as there was some workshop these folks attended at somepoint that said ‘you must have 5’), or tried to work on learning objectives and rather than focus on the implications of action and context the SME focused solely on the level they\u00a0thought they needed\u00a0<\/em>to hit on Bloom’s Taxonomy are just two examples of where I see this type of “rule” interfering with what could be effective design and development.<\/p>\n

If we are to consider a context shift, I might instead propose to take a look at choose your own adventure structures rather than MCQs. Atlas Obscura published a story\u00a0These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of \u2018Choose Your Own Adventure\u2019 Books<\/em><\/a>. What you notice in a few of these maps is that most often there are two choices. That’s a simple design. In some cases there are 3 and even 4 choices. That’s not the most interesting thing about these depictions though. Notice that in a number of the maps, there are a variety of options throughout the pathways. Sometimes a pathway only has 2 options at each decision point. Other times, one of two choices can lead to a junction that has four decision points. Now that’s interesting. If we consider this instead we should take away the idea that provide however many decisions at\u00a0each decision point<\/strong> as would make sense in the given scenario. Don’t limit yourself to an arbitrary quantity rule or suggestion.<\/p>\n

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Branching Scenario Icon, by Joubel, published at https:\/\/h5p.org\/content-types-and-applications<\/a> under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christy Tucker has been blogging about creating blogging scenarios lately, the most recent of which is\u00a0How many options in branching scenario decisions? The framing of this post closely relates the number of alternatives presented in basic multiple choice questions to how many decisions are available in branching scenarios. In case you missed this post making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-instructional-design"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/files\/2020\/01\/branching-scenario-icon.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1423,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions\/1423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}