are all questions created equal?: factors that influence cloze question difficulty

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Are all questions created equal?: Factors that influence cloze

question difficulty.

Brooke Soden Hensler Carnegie Mellon University

(starting graduate school at Florida Center for Reading Research this Fall)

Joseph E. Beck Carnegie Mellon University

Funding: National Science Foundation

Society for the Scientific Study of Reading – July 2006

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Why Look at Multiple Choice Cloze Questions?

Multiple Choice Cloze are widely used assessments of comprehension

Problem: outcome measure is typically binary (little information about student).

Goal: use multiple choice cloze questions to… More accurately assess students Track student reading development Better understand what makes cloze questions

hard

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Project LISTEN’s Computer Reading Tutor(Mostow & Aist, 2001)

Automated

Students use throughout year

Accompanying paper standardized test scores (pre & post)

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Student is reading a story aloud to the Reading Tutor…

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A question appears…*Reading Tutor reads both Question and Response Choices.(Mostow, et al., 2004)

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Student resumes reading story aloud to the Reading Tutor…

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Reading Tutor Advantages

Well-specified & unbiased question construction (randomly generated)

Questions automatically administered, scored, & recorded

Longitudinal collection over school year

Large N (students & questions)

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How many Q’s from Whom?Data Description

81,175 Questions

1042 Students

11 = Median number of questions answered (Many students infrequent users of tutor)

2001-02 & 2002-03 School years

Diverse population in Pittsburgh area

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Research Questions

Is a particular part of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, etc.) more difficult for students? If nouns are learned first (Gentner, 1982; Golinkoff, et

al., 2000), might students be more proficient at answering noun questions?

Which factors influence question difficulty?

How can we better assess students using multiple choice cloze questions? Vocabulary researchers have given partial credit for

correct part of speech (e.g., Schwanenflugel, et al., 1997)

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Approach

Build logistic regression model to predict individual question performance Terms in model: student identity, part of speech

of answer, properties of question (e.g., question length)

Advantages of modeling approach Simultaneously estimates impact of question

properties and student proficiency on question performance

Makes use of all ~80k questions

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Effect of Parts of Speech

Nouns Verbs AdverbsAdjectives(p < 0.001)

< <<(p < 0.001) (p < 0.05)

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Effect of Parts of Speech

Nouns Verbs AdverbsAdjectives(p < 0.001)

easier harder

< <<(p < 0.001) (p < 0.05)

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Impact of other Part of Speech terms

Difficulty SignificanceMost Common p < 0.01Part of Speech

# of Choices p < 0.001with Answer’s POS

“Sally had to _______ her lips when she heard the news.”(cloud, purse, holds, magnificent)

“Henry read his _______ under the tree.”(cup, dog, book, hair)

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“Sally had to _______ her lips when she heard the news.”(lamp, purse, beautiful, magnificent)


less common POS = harder

more common POS = easier

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“Sally had to _______ her lips when she heard the news.”(lamp, purse, beautiful, magnificent)


fewer choices with correct POS

more choices with correct POS = harder

= easier

(verb)

(noun)

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Impact of other terms

Difficulty SignificanceQuestion p < 0.001Length

Deletion p < 0.001Location

“We can _______ the stars in the sky despite the bright city lights around us.”(at, with, most, see)

“They rode their _______ .”(farmer, bikes, play, blue)

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longer = harder

shorter = easier

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blank earlier = harder

blank later = easier

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Using model to assess student reading comprehension

Model estimates Beta parameter for each student Represents how well student did at answering cloze

questions (controlling for difficulty factors) Should correlate with external comprehension measure

Compare Beta vs. percent correct for predicting WRMT comprehension composite* Student Beta: r = .644, p < .001 Percent correct: r = .507, p < .001 Reliability of difference in correlations, p < .01

Also provides check on validity of regression model

*N = 465, 1 extreme outlier was eliminated from analyses.

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Conclusions

Length of question, location of deleted word, and part of speech of correct answer affect question difficulty.

Logistic regression is a strong choice for analyzing cloze data.

Multiple-choice cloze questions can assess a student at a more accurate level than current practice.

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Questions?

Nominated for Best Paper Award:

Soden Hensler, B., Beck, J. E. (2006). Better student assessing by finding difficulty factors in a fully automated comprehension measure. Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

Brooke Soden [email protected]

Joseph E. [email protected]

Project LISTEN & The Reading Tutorhttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen/

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References

Gentner, D. (1981). Some interesting differences between verbs and nouns. Cognition and Brain Theory, 4(2).

Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Bloom, L., Smith, L. B., Woodward, A. L., Akhtar, N., Tomasello, M., & Hollich, G. (2000). Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mostow, J. & Aist, G. (2001). Evaluating tutors that listen: An overview of Project LISTEN. In K. Forbus & P. Feltovich (Eds.), Smart Machines in Education (169 - 234) Menlo Park, CA: MIT/AAAI Press.

Mostow, J., Beck, J. E., Bey, J., Cuneo, A., Sison, J., Tobin, B. & Valeri, J. (2004). Using automated questions to assess reading comprehension, vocabulary, and effects of tutorial interventions. Technology, Instruction, Cognition and Learning, 2, p. 97-134

Schwanenflugel, P.J., Stahl, S. A., & McFalls, E. L. (1997). Partial word knowledge and vocabulary growth during reading comprehension. Journal of Literacy Research, 29(4).

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Additional Slides

x

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Terms in Model

Factors Description of Term

Part of SpeechSimplified part of speech classification of the correct answer as Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, or Function Word.

Most Common Part of Speech

Whether or not the correct answer’s POS is the most common POS the word could take on.

POS Confusability The number of POS the correct answer can take on.

Level of Difficulty4 Levels of Difficulty based on frequency in English or special annotation.

Student Identity Unique Identification for each student.

Covariates

Question LengthNumber of characters of the cloze question and the corresponding response choices.

Deletion LocationProportion of the sentence that is before the blank (location of word deletion).

# Choices with Answer's POS

Probability that the student could have answered the question using only part of speech information.

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Developmental Trends in Learning Parts of Speech

<=2 2…3 3…4 4…5 >=5

Reading Proficiency

Like

lihoo

d of

ans

wer

ing

ques

tion

corr

ectly

Nouns

Verbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Function Words

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Developmental Trends in Learning Parts of Speech

<=2 2…3 3…4 4…5 >=5

Reading Proficiency

Like

lihoo

d of

ans

wer

ing

ques

tion

corr

ectly

Nouns

Verbs

p < .001

p = .71

p = .99

p = .52 p = .64

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Syntactic Awareness

-0.6

-0.5

-0.4

-0.3

-0.2

-0.1

0

0.1

<=2 2…3 3…4 4…5 >=5

Reading Proficiency

Rel

ativ

e Im

pac

t

Impact of #POS wordcan take on

p = .48

p = .73

p = .01p = .02

p < .001

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Effect of Part of Speech*Interpretation: positive Beta means student is more likely to answer question correctly

Part of Speech

Noun < Verb < Adjective < Adverb <Function Words

Beta 0.39 0.29 0.19 0.12 (comparison point)

Significance p < .001 p < .001 p < .001 p < .001 ---

are all questions created equal?: factors that influence cloze question difficulty

Documents

cloze question difficulty

reading tutora question

properties of question

speech of answer

reading research

choices p

question performancemakes

noun questions