Fig. 7

Question development using published phylogeny of mammals, assessment trees, and images. a Taxa selected from a mammalian phylogeny (modified from Fig. 1 in Meredith et al. 2011) with clades color-coded. b Assessment categories for each taxonomic group. c Taxa selected for the assessment question: flying squirrel (focal; green), rabbit (MCR; green), flying phalanger (similarity; purple), cat (proximity; blue), and wolf (node counting; blue). d A color-coded rooted tree (C.2 in Figs. 3, 4c) is constructed with the selected taxa. e Assessment tree developed with tree C.2.1 (Fig. 4c). The assessment tree is configured by branch addition and clade rotation about nodes so taxa acting as distracters in the question represent their respective incorrect strategy. Sample question: Who is most closely related to the Flying Squirrel? a. Flying Phalanger, b. Wolf, c. Cat, d. Rabbit