Please can I have your thoughs on the following proposal:
What I am proposing
At the moment, when a student submits an answer to a quiz question or when they review their attempt later, they may get some feedback about the answer they chose, get told their grade, or get shown the right answer to the question. Which bits they see when depends on the quiz settings.
At the OU, we feel that there is a gap here. Often, in addition to the feedback that is specific to the student's chosen answer, we want to display some extra text to all students to reinforce the concepts in the question. Here is a quite long example of the kind of thing I mean from a chemistry question. After they have finished this particular question, and after they get told whether their answer was right or wrong, we want all students to see:
The atomic number of lithium is 3. From the strips beneath the elements symbols, the order of sub-shell filling up to the end of Period 2 is 1s, 2s, 2p. The length of the strips indicate the number of electrons that each sub-shell can hold; 2 for the s sub-shell and 6 for the p sub-shell.
So the electron configuration of the lithium atom is 1s2 2s1.
So the electron configuration of the lithium atom is 1s2 2s1.
A shorter example that might be used with a maths question might be:
If you don't feel confident multiplying and dividing negative number, you may want to re-read section 2.2 of the lecture notes.
At the moment you can't really do this. In some question types you can fake it by copying and pasting the same text into all the feedback boxes, but that sucks, and it does not work with other question types, for example multiple-choice multiple-reponse questions.
I am proposing to call this extra information that is displayed to all students 'commentary', and to give teachers the option of adding some commentary when they are creating or editing a question.
How I am proposing to implement it
- Add a new text box to the editing page for each question type, where the teacher can type some commentary text if they want to. This box probably goes at the end of the form.
- Add columns 'commentarytext' and 'commentarytextformat' to the mdl_question table to store this information for each question.
- Add a new column of check boxes to the 'Students may review ...' part of the quiz settings page, to control when this commentary is displayed to students.
- Display the commentary text beside the question when appropriate according to the quiz settings. I think this should go after the question text and controls and any specific feed back, and before the grading information.
Note (or should I say commentary
): I decided it would be a good idea to post about changes I was planning before actually implementing them. Hence this message.
This is partly so you know what is coming up, but more importantly so more people can review the proposals and point out any flaws or suggest any improvements before it is too late.
Also it is really helpful to me to write down how I plan to implement it. That makes life a lot easier when I start writing the code.
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