From the enduringly excellent Nielsen Norman Group is this article, “Reading Content on Mobile Devices“, by KATE MEYER which repeats tests done for reading speed and accuracy on mobile devices and computers. Folks are getting better about reading on mobile devices, I’ll have to accept that and move on. However, it takes longer and is harder for readers to understand more difficult material on mobile devices. I wonder if this too will change, although I suspect that will take longer. So, for now, if I want students to read and understand relatively complex material I’ll continue to print it out and bring it to class, since many of us will be using our mobile devices to read it otherwise.
Also, while they recommend open ended questions instead of closed ones, and I agree with them for some purposes, I think our work on assessment keeps the questions deliberately closed for useful reasons. For one, it’s more in line with the Kirkpatrick levels. Closed-ended questions keep the options limited for the purposes of learning and assessing goals. We hope they also do these three things that are from the list of when to ask closed ended questions from the article:
“When collecting data that must be measured carefully over time, for example with repeated (identical) research efforts
When the set of possible answers is strictly limited for some reason
After you have done enough qualitative research that you have excellent multiple-choice questions that cover most of the cases”
We hope to be doing this over time, the possible answer are limited to conform to our learning outcomes and we do hope that they are excellent questions that cover the cases that we are interested in measuring.