Open Ended Questions: Study by Explaining, Not Spotting

When a quiz gives you four options, part of the work is done for you. The right answer is on the page, and you only need to recognize it. Open ended questions take that support away. You have to pull the idea out of memory, put it in order and say it clearly. That is exactly what essays, oral exams and problem sets will ask of you.

This post covers why open questions are worth the extra effort, a set of question stems you can reuse in any subject, and a simple way to grade yourself honestly. It is part of our practice testing guide.

Sean Kang, Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger compared quiz formats in a 2007 study. Students read short journal articles and took either a multiple choice quiz, a short answer quiz, or read key statements again. When the quizzes came with corrective feedback, the short answer group did best on the final test three days later. The authors concluded that more demanding retrieval brings greater benefit.

There is a catch in the same paper. Without feedback, students got many short answer items wrong at first and benefited less. So open questions work best when you check your answer right after writing it.

"What is osmosis?" is open, but it mostly asks for a memorized definition. "Why does a red blood cell burst in pure water?" asks you to use the definition. The second question is harder, and it shows whether you actually understand the idea. Aim for a mix: a few recall questions to warm up, then mostly questions that make you reason.

• History: Why did the treaty fail within ten years? What would a critic at the time have said?
• Biology: What would happen to blood glucose if the pancreas stopped making insulin?
• Economics: How is a price ceiling different from a subsidy in its effect on supply?
• Literature: How does the narrator's unreliability change the meaning of the final chapter?

Self grading fails when you read the model answer and think "yes, that is what I meant". To avoid that, list the marking points before you compare. Three to five points per question is typical. Then tick only the points that are actually in your writing.

A worked example

Question: "Why does a red blood cell burst in pure water?" A first attempt might read: "Because water goes into the cell." The marking points from the textbook are: the cell's inside has more dissolved solutes than pure water, water moves by osmosis toward the higher solute concentration, the cell has no wall to resist the pressure, so it swells and bursts. The first attempt hits one point out of four. The rewrite adds the solute difference, names osmosis, and explains the missing cell wall. That gap, from one point to four, is exactly the learning you would have missed by rereading.

Notice that the weak first answer was not wasted. It showed precisely which links were missing. That is the real value of open ended questions: they make gaps visible in a way that a page of familiar notes never will.

A workable weekly rhythm is to write two or three open questions after each lecture, answer them the next day, and come back to the ones you struggled with a few days later. That spacing matters as much as the questions themselves, which is the core idea of spaced repetition.

If you are short on questions, LearnKit can generate open questions from your notes or a PDF, each with a sample answer. You write your answer first, then reveal the sample to grade yourself.

• Reading the sample answer first. Once you have seen it, you are rereading, not recalling.
• Writing only definition questions. Push at least half your questions into why, how and what if.
• Grading on vibes. Without a list of marking points, almost every answer looks good enough.
• Skipping the rewrite. The rewrite is where the missing idea gets stored. It takes two minutes.

Open questions also pair well with other techniques. Asking yourself why a fact is true is the core of elaborative interrogation, and explaining a step in your own words is self explanation. For essay exams in particular, see our guide to essay exam preparation. The broad research picture, summarized in a 2013 review of study techniques, rates practice testing among the most useful methods students can use.