Misconceptions are inherently different from incorrect responses or simple lack of knowledge—a misconception cannot be simply corrected by presenting the correct information or reasoning (Pintrich et al., 1993). Rather, one must gain awareness of the misconception, carefully attend to the incorrectness of the endorsed reasoning, gain access to the correct information, and engage in effortful learning to understand the new information. All too often misconceptions go unidentified; thus, there is a need for continued development of appropriate assessments that identify learner misconceptions to facilitate educator and learner understanding of the errors in cognition to clear a path for continued learning. Bradshaw et al. (2022) presented diagnostic concept inventories (DCI) as a framework to develop diagnostic assessments to detect misconceptions. Current DCIs are composed of multiple-choice items. While multiple-choice items are effective, two studies were designed to investigate the efficacy of combining binary response items with DCIs to detect misconceptions. The goal of Study 1 was to simulate data under empirical conditions in order to determine the extent to which the quality of the performance of a DCM designed for detecting misconceptions is impacted by item type (MC items and BR items). The results of Study 1 informed the design of Study 2. The purpose of Study 2 was to empirically evaluate the extent to which BR items are an effective item type for the detection of misconceptions. Five-hundred and fifty-one participants were recruited and randomly administered an adapted version of the Exploring Probability Assessment (EPA; Bradshaw et al., 2022) composed of either MC-items or BR-items. The misconception DINO model (Bradshaw et al., 2022) was fit to the MC and BR response data. The results provided sufficient evidence for the use of BR items for the purposes of detecting misconceptions within the DCI framework. DCIs composed of binary response items have the potential to detect specific cognitive processes (i.e., misconceptions) that deserve more attention – even when total scores suggest a level of proficiency that might be interpreted as sufficient (or meeting expectations).