Joseph Rézeau

In Moodle 1.8 (beta) for the MCQ question type, a new set of Overall Feedback options are available to the teacher:

• For any correct answer
• For any partially correct answer
• For any incorrect answer

I have started to experiment with those options and I am puzzled at their usefulness.

For multiple choice question, single select

Which one is an animal?

Answer	Grade	Feedback
the cat	100%	yes, the cat is an animal
the dinosaur	50%	well, it has been an animal
the bus	None	no, that's a transport
the rose	None	no, that's a flower

For that kind of question, the Overall Feedback options may be useful if a) there are a fairly large number of choices or b) the teacher is not interested in providing individual feedback. If individual feedback is available (my preferred option for Adaptive mode, of course), then the Overall feedback is useless and should not been used as it might confuse the student. If Overall Feedback is used, then the wording of each of the 3 available options has to be worked out very carefully if it is really aimed at helping the student a) understand why he was wrong and b) point him to a better choice...

For multiple choice question, multiple select

Which ones are animals?

Answer	Grade	Feedback
the cat	50%	OK for the cat
the mouse	50%	OK for the mouse
the bus	-50%	no, that's a transport
the rose	-50%	no, that's a flower

If Overall Feedback options are used, let's suppose we have these messages: For any correct answer; "Your answer is correct"; For any partially correct answer: "Your answer is partially correct" and For any incorrect answer: "Your answer is incorrect". The choice of Overall Feedback option to be displayed to the student is entirely dependent on the Grade computed from his choices, so the following choices will trigger the following messages:

• a) the cat -> 50% -> Your answer is partially correct
• b) the cat + the mouse -> 100% -> Your answer is correct
• c) the cat + the bus -> 0% -> Your answer is incorrect
• d) the mouse + the bus -> 0% -> Your answer is incorrect
• e) the cat + the mouse + the rose -> 50% -> Your answer is partially correct

Now, if the teacher sticks to these "general" messages for the 3 options, they are meaningful (but useless) messages for the student. They are useless because the standard, default Correct, Partially Correct and Incorrect feedback messages (as existing in the previous versions of Moodle) will also be displayed anyway.

If the teacher tries to write not general but specific messages for those 3 options, it is problematic, since it is impossible to know in advance the combination of student choices which will trigger any of those messages, except for case b) above, where all is correct. For example, how can a teacher write a meaningful Overall feedback message of the Partially correct type relevant for both a) and e) above? In a) the answer is deemed partially correct because the student only selected one of the two correct answers and in e) it is aslo deemed partially correct because he selected the 2 correct answers plus one incorrect answer.

My conclusion is that the Overall Feedback options are at best useless and at worst potentially confusing to the student. But I'd love to be proven wrong (with real, concrete examples, please). And course, no-one is forced to use the Overall feedback options.

Joseph

Bonjour Valery,

Merci de ton intérêt pour le plugin REGEXP. J'avais commencé à le développer sous 1.5, mais c'est maintenant de l'histoire ancienne. Tu pourrais toujours télécharger la version pour 1.6 et examiner une possible adaptation à 1.5 mais je doute que ça soit facile, car il y a eu des changements très importants entre 1.5 et 1.6 dans la façon dont les questions sont gérées. Auparavant les questions faisaient partie du module quiz, maintenant elles sont indépendantes. L'idée étant que les questions sont créées et rangées dans une "banque de questions" où peuvent venir piocher non seulement le module quiz (test) mais aussi le module Leçon, ou d'autres modules si nécessaire. En fait, l'idée n'a pas beaucoup progressé, et le module Leçon n'a toujours pas accès (directement) aux questions de la banque de questions dans 1.7 ni 1.8 (beta)...

Sinon, merci de m'envoyer du feedback si tu peux l'installer sur une 1.6 ou plus.

Joseph

PS.- Pour voter, ce n'est pas le MDL-2129 (qui est fermé) mais le MDL-2727.

Hello Daniel,

Apparently your problem has nothing to do with the Lesson module in Moodle. You should really re-post your question to the General Problems forum.

But you are not likely to get help because it is quite impossible to understand what your problem really is from your description.

"I have downloaded as well as uploaded contents of a course but I am unable to access." does not mean anything in Moodleese. Are you familiar with Moodle or a beginner? Where is your Moodle site installed? etc.

Please do explain your exact situation and post this to General Problems,

All the best,

Joseph

Hi Jeff,

I'm glad that you worked it out. As you say the mySql manual is way too big for people who only need an occasional query. It might be a good idea to have (in the Moodle docs) a kind of repository of useful such queries (with lots of clear comments and concrete examples, such as yours). It might take the form of Q/A.

Q.- How do I set the feedback field of the answers of all MCQ type questions with grade = 0 to 'Incorrect'?

A.- Enter the following mySql query:
UPDATE mdl_question_multichoice, mdl_question_answers
First of all, we pick the two tables we will be using and put a comma between them. This tells MySQL that you are going to do something with both tables.
...

What do you think?
Joseph

This kind of error usually happens when there is someting wrong with the syntax of the question just created or edited. What type of question generates this error on your system? Cloze type questions are particularly sensitive to syntax errors. Do you get this error when you create a brand-new question? when you edit an existing question? when you import questions from file (which format)? We need lots more information in order to understand what the problem might be. I'd be surprised that it's something to do with your db limit, but it might also be a data corruption problem.

Joseph