Open-ended questions focus on students' understanding, their ability to reason, and their ability to apply knowledge in less traditional contexts. Such questions can communicate levels of student achievement more clearly than multiple-choice items and give better guidance for instruction.

Open-ended questions are not multiple-choice questions without options. They are not questions that demand a single correct response. Nor are they questions where any response is acceptable.

Rather, open-ended questions address the essential concepts, processes, and skills that go beyond the specifics of instruction to define a subject area. In general, they require complex thinking and yield multiple solutions. Open-ended questions require teachers or evaluators to interpret and use multiple criteria in evaluating responses. Such questions also require more from students than simply memorizing facts.

In this article, we give a rationale for using open-ended questions. Next, we discuss open-ended questions in reading, and finally, we outline some implications for the classroom.

RATIONALE FOR OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS

During the past decade, how we view learning and instruction has changed. Cognitive researchers have provided evidence about the complexity of learning: Conceptual understanding is more than just an accumulation of knowledge. It depends on an active restructuring of old ideas to accommodate new experiences.

These research findings, with their emphasis on personal accountability, have resonated in the practical world. As computers become repositories for information, both policy planners and business experts have noted an increasing need for people who can manage information, see patterns, identify needs, and solve problems with buy essay. At the same time, people who know the most about the content itself have begun to re-examine what it means "to know" a discipline. In doing so, they are discovering common themes and concepts underlying the various content areas. Similar processes might be involved in learning and understanding any subject area.

So, today we're seeing the focus shift from learning as content knowledge per se to learning as the ability to use and interpret knowledge critically and thoughtfully. Subject matter has always dominated education. In elementary schools, the day is punctuated by shifts from reading to math to science to social studies, as students put away one set of books or papers and take out another. In middle schools and high schools, students move from class to class, subject to subject, without seeing how one subject relates to another. Even within subject areas, the layer-cake approach to curriculum obscures common ideas and themes, reinforcing the notion that subject-area knowledge consists of a set of discrete facts and theories.

Now, however, subject-area knowledge faces a serious challenge. Some experts argue that critical thinking is as relevant to literature as it is to science, social studies, and mathematics; that problem solving is not the sole purview of mathematics, and that hypothesis formulation is not limited to science.

This change in how we view the goals of education has implications for evaluation as well as instruction. If subject knowledge in itself is not a sufficient criterion for achievement, judgments of correct and incorrect in response to simple tests of skills and knowledge are not enough either. To measure how well a student performs, teachers have to be able writing a research paper outline to examine the process, not just the final product. Furthermore, people try to make sense of their perceptions and experiences, and the associations that students make are often idiosyncratic and may differ considerably from the ones we intended. These views of student learning demand a more open-ended form of testing, along with a more complex scheme of evaluation.