ACER eNews


Assessing interpersonal understandings A candidate’s ability to understand interpersonal situations and to reason about human feelings and interactions has become an increasingly important consideration in the medical selection process. There is a growing recognition that medical practitioners require more than academic skills to be good at their jobs; they also need to be good communicators and readers of people. ‘Interpersonal’ multiple-choice questions are designed to assess a candidate’s ability to understand and infer the thoughts, feelings, behaviour, motivations, and/or intentions of the people depicted in text-based scenarios, dialogues and passages. Such multiple-choice questions are currently being used across Australia as part of a battery of instruments to differentiate between large numbers of academically qualified candidates applying for limited places in university medical courses. At ACER, interpersonal questions are developed according to a ‘construct of empathy’, where empathy is regarded as a cognitive ability requiring reasoning about interpersonal situations. As such, interpersonal questions do not aim to test candidates’ knowledge of social conventions or their opinions about human behaviour. Rather they aim to test how much candidates understand about what is happening inside, and between, the people depicted in given scenarios. There are two main types of stimulus texts used in the creation of interpersonal questions: intra-personal – inward-focused, 1st person accounts of individual feelings and experiences; and interpersonal – situations, scenarios or vignettes involving two or more characters, usually dialogue-based. The major requirement of all interpersonal stimulus texts is that they are authentic in the sense that they reflect real life. They must also contain some kind of emotional conflict. Whether this conflict originates from a misunderstanding or tension between people, or from some private suffering, struggle or excitement expressed by an individual, without agitation of some kind – and variation within the expression of that agitation – there would be little scope for asking questions which test an understanding of human emotion and motivation. The best interpersonal texts are those which open themselves to misinterpretation – not from any linguistic ambiguity, but from complexities arising from expressed human feelings and behaviours that might be counter-intuitive or contradictory, subtle or understated, implied or suggested, unexpected or exaggerated, or even misunderstood by the characters themselves. Ideally, interpersonal stimulus texts are ‘emotionally complex’ as opposed to ‘verbally confusing’. Where correct interpretations (keys) are specified, they must be demonstrably true from evidence within the text. Conversely, incorrect answers (distracters) – though still plausible in the sense of their intelligibility and relatedness – must be misreadings of the given situation and defensibly wrong. When we ask interpersonal questions we are, at some level, testing knowledge and experience of shared human actions and emotions. We are asking candidates to look inward at their own experiences for confirmation that their interpretations of a particular situation are correct. We are asking them to place themselves into others’ shoes; to imagine others’ minds; to seek an understanding of others’ feelings through the interpretative medium of their own feelings. The measurable part occurs once we ask candidates to take this empathetic knowledge and reason with it in situations separate to their own lives and opinions. This article is based on a conference presentation delivered by ACER Research Fellow David Norris at the 3rd International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, held in Barcelona in July. The conference paper, titled 'Assessing interpersonal understandings with multiple choice questions', was co-authored by ACER Research Fellows David Norris and Brad Jackel. « Back to eNews
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A candidate’s ability to understand interpersonal situations and to reason about human feelings and interactions has become an increasingly important consideration in the medical selection process. There is a growing recognition that medical practitioners require more than academic skills to be good at their jobs; they also need to be good communicators and readers of people.

‘Interpersonal’ multiple-choice questions are designed to assess a candidate’s ability to understand and infer the thoughts, feelings, behaviour, motivations, and/or intentions of the people depicted in text-based scenarios, dialogues and passages. Such multiple-choice questions are currently being used across Australia as part of a battery of instruments to differentiate between large numbers of academically qualified candidates applying for limited places in university medical courses.

At ACER, interpersonal questions are developed according to a ‘construct of empathy’, where empathy is regarded as a cognitive ability requiring reasoning about interpersonal situations. As such, interpersonal questions do not aim to test candidates’ knowledge of social conventions or their opinions about human behaviour. Rather they aim to test how much candidates understand about what is happening inside, and between, the people depicted in given scenarios.

There are two main types of stimulus texts used in the creation of interpersonal questions:

intra-personal – inward-focused, 1st person accounts of individual feelings and experiences; and
interpersonal – situations, scenarios or vignettes involving two or more characters, usually dialogue-based.

The major requirement of all interpersonal stimulus texts is that they are authentic in the sense that they reflect real life. They must also contain some kind of emotional conflict. Whether this conflict originates from a misunderstanding or tension between people, or from some private suffering, struggle or excitement expressed by an individual, without agitation of some kind – and variation within the expression of that agitation – there would be little scope for asking questions which test an understanding of human emotion and motivation.

The best interpersonal texts are those which open themselves to misinterpretation – not from any linguistic ambiguity, but from complexities arising from expressed human feelings and behaviours that might be counter-intuitive or contradictory, subtle or understated, implied or suggested, unexpected or exaggerated, or even misunderstood by the characters themselves. Ideally, interpersonal stimulus texts are ‘emotionally complex’ as opposed to ‘verbally confusing’. Where correct interpretations (keys) are specified, they must be demonstrably true from evidence within the text. Conversely, incorrect answers (distracters) – though still plausible in the sense of their intelligibility and relatedness – must be misreadings of the given situation and defensibly wrong.

When we ask interpersonal questions we are, at some level, testing knowledge and experience of shared human actions and emotions. We are asking candidates to look inward at their own experiences for confirmation that their interpretations of a particular situation are correct. We are asking them to place themselves into others’ shoes; to imagine others’ minds; to seek an understanding of others’ feelings through the interpretative medium of their own feelings. The measurable part occurs once we ask candidates to take this empathetic knowledge and reason with it in situations separate to their own lives and opinions.

This article is based on a conference presentation delivered by ACER Research Fellow David Norris at the 3rd International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, held in Barcelona in July. The conference paper, titled 'Assessing interpersonal understandings with multiple choice questions', was co-authored by ACER Research Fellows David Norris and Brad Jackel.