Multiple Choice Questions in Google Forms

Using Multiple Choice in Google Forms^TM

Multiple choice questions are easy to create in Google Forms and can be used for a variety of purposes when it comes to escape rooms. I use multiple choice questions for branching (a post will be coming on this in the near future), for selecting appropriate answers, or for voting on a choice. In today’s Quick Tip Tuesday, I wanted to share with you a mistake I made in using multiple choice questions in my early attempts at creating escape rooms which allowed students to progress through the puzzles even if they had clicked the wrong answer.

Creating a Multiple Choice Question that are Self-Check

As you may know, you can create quizzes with Google Forms that are self-grading. I do not create my escape rooms using the quiz function. What if you do not want to allow students to progress unless they click the correct answer? There are several steps to creating a multiple choice question that are self-checking and can allow users to progress to the next page if correct, stay on the same page if incorrect, or go to another page with hints if they are incorrect.. This graphic will help you follow along as I explain each step.

1. Click the + button to add a new question.
2. From the dropdown, select “Multiple choice.”
3. Toggle the “Required” button to on.
4. Click the three dots next to the required button (sorry, the pop-up window blocks the three dots, but you can see where to click).
5. Choose “Go to Section Based on Answer.” You can also click on “Shuffle Option Order” in this window if you’d like the answer choices are given in a random order.

This is the basic set-up that you will need. Next, you will need to type in your question and include a graphic if you’d like. Then you type in your answer choices. You’ll notice drop-down menus under each answer choice. Here is how I use them.

• Before creating the questions, I create the next sections where I want my answers to lead to. In this case, I have an Oops! section that provides a hint and another chance to answer the question for students who answered incorrectly. 
• If you’d like students to stay on the same page if they answer incorrectly, then choose the current section title where the question is located from the dropdown.
• For the correct answer choice, I choose “Continue to next section” from the dropdown. My next section is the next puzzle in the escape room. Alternatively, you can choose the section name to avoid confusion.

The Mistake I Made

In one of the first online escape rooms I created, I had a page with several multiple choice questions asking students to place parentheses in order of operations problems to make them true. (Here is a link to the product page where you can see an example of the question type). On the wrong answer choices, I had my settings so that students would stay on the original page. I tested everything out, and I fully believed it was working perfectly.

Here’s the thing with Google Forms. When you have more than one multiple choice question in a section, only the “Go to section based on answer” only works on the last question in the section! In the case of my escape room, students could answer the first two questions incorrectly, and as long as they answered the final question correctly, they were allowed to progress to the next puzzle. As you can imagine, that didn’t play out too well with teachers who were expecting a self-checking product to help with assessment! Thankfully, I learned my lesson early on and solved the problem by having each of my multiple-choice questions on its own page in order to force the correct answer to be chosen for all three questions.

Hopefully this Quick Tip Tuesday prevents you from making the same mistake I did with multiple choice questions in Google Forms!