Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

• Nasim Sabeti Moghaddam Sabzevar ¹
• Afsharizadeh Seyed Ehsan ²
• Zahra Tarazi ³

¹ Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, Azad University, Qom, Iran

² Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology & Educational Sciences, Hakim Un. of Sabzevar, Sabzevar, Iran

³ Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and Counseling, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Background and Objectives: The growth of cognitive theories since the 1950s has significantly increased the role of technology in cognitive models and modern learning theories in psychology and educational sciences. Ausubel's meaningful learning in 1968 inspired an idea that Richard Mayer later utilized in 1989 for his cognitive theory of multimedia learning, a theory in which the use of images alongside text enhances learning. Every learning process requires evaluation, and there must be a correspondence between the two; therefore, the idea of multimedia testing was proposed by Lindner and Hu in the early 2020s, and they investigated the role of pictures in test questions in various studies. This research aims to determine the role of multiple-choice questions and multimedia constructed responses on students’ performance in the Science Test while following the cognitive theory of multimedia in the field of assessment.
Methods: The present study is applied in terms of research purpose and quasi-experimental in terms of data collection, classified as a 2*2 within-subject design. The statistical population consisted of all fifth-grade students in the city of Sabzevar during the 2023-2024 academic year; from which 602 students were selected from four girls' schools and five boys' schools using a one-stage cluster sampling method. To collect data, a short 28-question TIMSS 2015 science test was used to assess student performance, which included four types of questions: text-picture multiple-choice, text-only multiple-choice, text-picture constructed response, and text-only constructed response, forming the four experimental conditions of the study. To randomly assign subjects to the four mentioned experimental conditions, the sheets were distributed randomly among the sample. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA, and descriptive and inferential statistics were run using SPSS 26, while Microsoft Excel was used to organize the question type columns.
Findings: The findings indicated that there are significant differences among types of questions in the dependent variable of performance in science. However, there is no significant difference between the effects of question type on the performance of male and female students. Students performed significantly better on the text-pictre multiple-choice questions compared to both the text-picture constructed responses and the text-only constructed responses, but there was no significant difference when compared to the text-only multiple-choice questions. Additionally, the results showed that performance on text-only constructed responses was significantly better than on text-only constructed responses. Performance on text-only multiple-choice questions was significantly better than on picture-text based constructed responses, and finally, text-only constructed responses had significantly lower performance compared to all other types of questions.
Conclusion: The results showed that not only does the multimedia aspect matter, but also the type (the combination of format and multimedia) of the question presented affects the quality of assessment. Specifically, text-picture multiple-choice questions had a greater impact on performance compared to text-picture constructed responses, even though both types included a picture. On the other hand, better performance on text-picture constructed responses compared to text-only constructed responses indicates the influence of the multimedia aspect, even though the format was the same in both questions. This suggests that, in addition to the format, the multimedia aspect of the question plays a decisive role, and the impact is not solely dependent on the presence of a picture and the multimedia aspect; rather, a combination of both factors—format and multimedia—creates a significant effect.

Keywords

• Multimedia Testing
• Multimedia Learning
• Multiple-Choice Question
• Constructed-Response Question
• Science Test

Main Subjects

• Education technology - Evaluation and testing

COPYRIGHTS 
© 2025 The Author(s).  This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)