Abstract—This study, based on a case study research design, aimed to identify Taiwanese elementary students’ difficulties in the process of generating multiple-choice items in the subject of social studies. Six sixth grade pupils with different achievement levels were recruited to participate for the entire 2015 school year. Each participant was required to pose two multiple-choice items in 20 minutes in class after the teacher finished teaching each social studies unit (24 units in total). Data collection methods included participant observations, document analysis of student-generated questions, and individual face-to-face interviews. The qualitative data analysis method was adopted for inducing convergent themes. Four main themes emerged related to the difficulties in student question-generation: finding appropriate content and the main ideas of the study material to construct questions on, completing the specified number of questions with options of adequate quality, formulating linguistically appropriate question stems, and constructing questions that involve higher-order cognitive levels. Based on the findings obtained from this study, explicit pedagogical suggestions regarding supports to help mitigate the difficulties that students encountered during student question-generation are provided, with their applicability to other larger contexts attended to. Index Terms—Experienced difficulties, elementary students, student question-generation, social studies teaching, multiple-choice items. I. INTRODUCTION Student question-generation (SQG) has been one of the contemporary innovative pedagogies and learning approaches in which it is not the teachers but instead the students who pose questions in a variety of formats based on a given problem, a certain topic, or a specific situation. It serves as a promising teaching strategy to engage students in self-reflection, self-evaluation, and self-adjustment, thereby maximizing the effectiveness of student learning. The existing literature has indicated the potential benefits of incorporating SQG into teaching, and documented various aspects of the positive effects on students [1], [2]. While many studies have evidenced that SQG can promote and facilitate the personal growth of learners, most were conducted with a quantitative experimental approach to examining how effective SQG is in isolation or in combination with different pedagogical designs [3]-[9]. Few Manuscript received March 20, 2017; revised September 2, 2017. Chih-Wei Kuo and Fu-Yun Yu are with the Institute of Education, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan (e-mail: louielucky@hotmail.com, fuyun.ncku@gmail.com). studies have been undertaken to examine the learning process and focus on the difficulties that students face when engaging in SQG. The current research, based on a case study on the difficulties of SQG encountered by Taiwanese students, is an effort to extend the existing literature. II. LITERATURE REVIEW SQG has been widely used for enhancing learning in a variety of disciplines, mostly in mathematics, but also in the natural and life sciences, as well as humanities and social sciences. Given different names in literature, such as student problem posing, student question posing, student problem authoring, student constructed assessment, and student-contributed assessment, SQG is well grounded in information-processing theory, which involves the dynamics of information storage, processing, retrieval, and transfer, and engages individuals in the practices of rehearsal, organization, and elaboration [10]. SQG is also supported by metacognition and constructivism, as it encourages students to transform and structure received information into personally meaningful knowledge through the use of different metacognitive abilities, such as reflection, monitoring, planning, evaluation, and adjustment [10]. SQG occurs under three types of situations: free, semi-structured, and structured [11]. SQG under a free situation enables individuals to engage in creative writing and generate questions in a less constrained way, such as the focal study material. Semi-structured SQG, however, gives the students more boundary conditions, such as unfinished problem structures, a picture, equation, or solving method as a reference point for question generation. Structured SQG occurs within a well-designed context, and individuals make changes based on existing questions to develop new ones. The three types of SQGs serve different purposes and achieve different goals with various pedagogical designs. Since the current study aims to examine the general difficulties that students face with SQG, we adopt the free type of SQG and put students into a naturalistic setting so as to better capture the problems they encounter. A number of studies have reported that students appear to perceive SQG as challenging [12]-[15]. Yu [15], for instance, found that nearly 60% of the participating university students regarded SQG as difficult or very difficult. Such difficulties are probably related to students’ limited experience of SQG during their formal education [12], [15], [16]. Several strategies have thus been utilized to deal with this, such as the use of story grammar [17], generic question stems [18], and Difficulties of Multiple-choice Question-Generation Encountered by Elementary Students in Social Studies: A Case Study Chih-Wei Kuo and Fu-Yun Yu International Journal of Information and Education Technology, Vol. 8, No. 4, April 2018 259 doi: 10.18178/ijiet.2018.8.4.1045