3.2 Item Construction
In constructing the multiple-choice items for the NGCI, we referred to the best practices outlined in Haladyna,
Downing, and Rodriguez (2002). Their 31 guidelines group into five categories: Content Concerns, Formatting
Concerns, Style Concerns, Writing the Stem, and Writing the Choices. Of these guidelines, several were
revisited repeatedly throughout development of the NGCI, such as focusing each item to reflect a specific
concept, using typical reasoning errors of students for distractor choices (i.e., the most-common misconceptions
uncovered from the open-response questions in Williamson and Willoughby (2012)), using simple vocabulary,
minimizing reading load, and keeping choices similar in length, consistent in content and grammatical structure,
and in a logical order when applicable.