This piece from Edudemic caught my attention because it fits with my annoyance in the simplistic thinking that so often permeates the debate over productive instructional practices. The Edudemic post ends up mostly arguing for the use of classroom use of questions to promote learning (e.g., Socrative), but it did illustrate the dangers of not differentiating the issues in high stakes testing, purposes for the use of methods that evaluate understanding, and how learning happens.
The blog post does not offer a link the research study that is indirectly cited frequently (through another online post that also does not include the full reference) so I ran it down. The research study demonstrates that “properly constructed multiple choice items” can improve retention of the information required to answer the questions. What this means in translation is that a “quality” MC item includes plausible distractors (the wrong answers). The appears to create an active cognitive experience in which the learner must recall and evaluate multiple items of information in order to determine the best answer. Hence, quality items generate active cognitive processing and not passive recall.
IMHO – it always comes down to getting the learner to think and there are many ways to do this.
Little, J.L., Bjork, E.L., Bjork, R.A., & Angello, G. (2012). Multiple-choice tests exonerated, at least of some charges: Fostering test-induced learning and avoiding test-induced forgetting. Psychological Science, 23, 1337-1344.