- Open Question
Open questions are text input questions for free text. For
obvious
reasons they cannot be auto corrected. The difference between an "Open
Question" and a "Short Answer" Item is that Open Questions accept
alphanumeric data from a user and only undergo manual "grading" by an
admin user through comparison with "correct" values configured during
Assessment authoring. Open Questions can either be short (textbox) or
long (text area) elements in the html form. Here are several
configuration options the authoring environment will support (in
addition to many others, such as alignment/orientation, required/not
required, etc etc):
- Size of the reply box: Radio buttons to set size of textbox:
small/medium/large; or text area
- Prefilled Answer Box: richtext widget. The content of this
field will be prefilled in the response of the user taking the survey
-> stored as item_default
- Correct Answer Box: richtext widget. The person correcting
the answers will see the contents of this box as correct answer for
comparison with the user response. -> stored as feedback_text
- [NTH nice to have?]: Button to add predefined comments next
to the correct answer box. This would be shown to the manual corrector
to quickly choose from when manually scoring the answer. What
kind of comments would these be? Should they be categorized entries in
the "message" system that admin users would populate over time, that
would be stuck into the authoring UI dynamically during Assessment
creation?
- Short Answer Item:
Short Answer Items allow the user to give a short answer to an
answer
box, which could be automatically corrected. The questioneer can define
what values are valid in each answer box and use various compare
functions to compare the output. The creation of a short answer
question will trigger entries into the as_item check tables. In
addition to supporting automated validation/grading, this
item type differs from "Open Questions" in that only textboxes are
supported -- meaning short answers, no text area essays.
- Intro_label: textarea. This contains the leading text that
will be presented before the first answerbox.
- Extro_label: textarea. This contains the trailing text.
- Number of Answerboxes: integer. Number of answerboxes
presented to the user.
- The questioneer has the option to define multiple possible
correct answers that will be matched with the response of the user in
various ways. For each of the possible answers the following fields are
given (among others):
- Answer: short_text. This contains the answer string that
will be matched against the response
- Data type: integer vs real number vs. text
- Upper/Lowercase: Radio boolean. This will control,
whether we
treat the response case sensitive when comparing it to the correct
answers or not.
- Value in %: short integer: How many percentage points a
match will awarded.
- Size: Integer Select: size of the input box (small,
medium, large)
- Compare
by: Select (equal, contains, regexp). This defines how the comparison
between the answer string and the response shall happen.
- Regexp: Textarea. If the compare by is a "regexp", this
field contains the actual regexp.
- sort_order
- Allow in answerbox: This defines to which answerbox the
answer check of the short_answer is compared to. If we have four
answerboxes and the question was "Name four European Capitals of
EU members", then you would 25 correct answers which could be given in
all answerboxes. If the question was "Name four European Capitals of EU
members ordered by Name", then you'd only have four answers "Athen,
Berlin, Copenhagen,
- Matching Item:
Matching questions are useful for matching some items on the
left with
pull down menues on the right hand side of a survey. The number of the
items is identical to the number of items on the right hand side. This
also appears to be a Section of Items; each Item consists of a single
"phrase" against which it is to be associated with one of a set of
potential choices (displayed via a select widget; could be radiobutton
though too). If there are several such matchings (three phrases
<-> three items in the popup select) then this is a Section with
three Items. The UI for this needs to be in section-edit, not
item-edit.
- Settings:
- Distribution of points: boolean (all or nothing /
increasing). All
or nothing will either give 100%, if all correct answers are given, or
0% else. Increasing will give (number of correct matches / number of
total matches) *100% points.
- Allow negative: boolean (yes/no). This will allow a
negative percentage as well (as the total result).
- A couple of match entries will be presented below the
settings. Each one will consist of:
- Match item: This is the item which will be displayed on
the left side of the question presented to the respondee.
- Matched item: This is the correct item from the select
box on
the right side. For each match item on the left there will be a select
box on the right with ALL the matched items (when taking the survey,
that is...)
- In addition to submit, there is another button to allow
further answers to be filled in. Typed in values shall be remembered
and 4 more answerboxes be shown.
- File upload item:
A file upload question will allow the respondent to upload a
file. No additional attributes but the usual for every question.
- Multiple Choice items:
Multiple Choice questions
allow the respondee to choose from multiple alternatives with the
possibility to answer more than one at a time. This will also deal with
True/False and Multiple response items.
- Settings:
- Allow Multiple: boolean (yes/no). This will determine if
the
respondee has the option to choose multiple possible answers for his
response. In the datamodell this information is stored with the
as_item_display_* object (e.g. along with the checkbox / select).
- Increasing: boolean (all or nothing /
increasing).
All or nothing will either give 100%, if all correct answers are given,
or 0% else. Increasing will give (number of correct matches / number of
total matches) *100% points.
- Allow negative: boolean (yes/no). This will allow a
negative percentage as well (as the total result).
For each (possible) answer we have a couple of fields
(as_item_choices):
- Correct answer: boolean, radio with grafik (red x, green
y) (yes/no). This marks if the current answer is a correct one.
- Answer: Richtext widget. Need option to associate
both/either a numeric value and a text value to each choice.
- Value: percentage value this answer gives to the
respondee -- this is different from the "answer"
- Feedback_text: richtext widget. This is a reply the
student can
see at
the end of the test giving him some more information on the question he
choose.
- content_value: cr_item. If we have an image it will be
shown
instead of the answer text. If we have a sound item, we will generate
audio includes.
- In addition to submit, there is another button to allow
further answers to be filled in. Typed in values shall be remembered
and 4 more answerboxes be shown.
- [Additional Feature]: Possibility to randomly choose from the
options. This would add a couple of fields:
- To each answer: Fixed position: Select Box, Choose the
mandatory position when displaying the option (e.g. "none of the
above").
- Number of correct answers: integer, defining how many
correct
options have to be displayed. Check if enough correct answers have been
defined.
- Number of answers: integer, defining how many options
shall
be displayed in total (correct and incorrect). Check if enough answers
are available.
- Display of options: Numerical, alphabetic, randomized or
by order of entry.
- All radio button Items must have a "clear" button that
unsets all the radiobuttons for the item.
(For that matter, every Section and every Assessment also must have
"clear" buttons. Fairly trivial with Javascript.)
Note that one special type of "multiple choice" question
consists of choices that are created by a database select. For
instance: a question like "Indicate your state" will have a select
widget that displays all state names obtained from the states table in
OpenACS.
- Rank question:
Rank questions ask for the answers to be ranked. This
appears to me to be a special case of the "matching question" in which
the select options are ordinal values, not arbitrary strings.
- Rank Type: Boolean (alphabetic, numeric). Shall the rank be
from a to z or from 1 to n.
- Only unique rank: Boolean (yes/no). Shall the ranking only
allow unique ranks (like 1,2,3,5,6 instead of 1,2,2,4,5)
- Straight order: Boolean (alphabetic, numeric). Shall the rank
be in a straight order or is it allowed to skip values (1,2,3 vs.
1,3,4)
- For each answer we ask the following questions:
- Answer: Richtext widget.
- Rank: correct rank
- In addition to submit, there is another button to allow
further answers to be filled in. Typed in values shall be remembered
and 4 more answerboxes be shown.
- Matrix table (blocked questions):
The idea here
is a "question" consisting of a group of questions. We include it here
because to many users, this does appear to be a "single" question.
However, it is actually more appropriately recognized to be a
"section"
because it is a group of questions, a response to each of which will
need to be separately stored by the system. Further, this is in fact a
display option for the section that could reasonably be used for any
Item Type. For instance, there are situations where an Assessment
author may want to group a set of selects, or radiobuttons, or small
textboxes, etc.
- Composite matrix-based multiple response item:
Same as the matrix table, but you have different choices that
are displayed in each column.
- Composite multiple choice with Fill-in-Blank item:
Multiple Choice question with an additional short_text input
field. Usually used for the "Other" thing
- Calculation:
This type of question will not be
supported. But we should make sure we can take care of that type while
importing the data from WebCT. Therefore we have to know the values. At
a later stage, we will add more info on this.
- Formula: string
- Units
- Value (in %): integer
- Required (boolean)
- Ignore Space (boolean)
- Ignore spell checking (boolean)
- General Feedback: richtext
Only site wide admins will get to see the following question types: