Fill-in-the-Blank

Description

Allows for the presentation of a paragraph of text with certain blanks inserted. It is the candidate's job to supply the missing words when answering the question.

Rationale

A number of other e-assessment systems support this type of question so it seemed reasonable that Rogo should also support this.

Fit Criterion

Presentation

• The UI should allow for any number of blanks to be inserted. Blanks are made by 'blank' tags: [blank] and [/blank]
• Presentation options to allow:
  • Blank textboxes - no prompting to students
  • Dropdown lists - student picks from a randomised list of options

Marking

Two basic marking methods are possible:

In either marking method academic staff should be able to specify the number of marks to award if correct and the number (possibly negative) if wrong. Marks correct should range from 1 to 20 and marks incorrect from 0 to -10 with the addition of -0.25 and -0.5.

Blank Textbox Marking

When 'Presentation' is set to 'Blank Textboxes' all the terms within the blank tags are the correct answers. This allows staff to specify a number of alternatives (e.g. GB, Great Britain, UK, United Kingdom).

Sometimes it can be difficult for academic staff to specify before an exam all the possible correct permutations of a correct answer. For this reason, when in 'Blank Textboxes' mode Rogo will allow to include other options as correct after a summative exam has run. To do this go into the 'Frequency & Discrimination' report and there should be a 'Correct' button next to each blank in the Fill-in-the-Blank question. This will open up a new dialog box showing all the unique answers used by the cohort. Simply check all the options you wish to award a mark. The script will add these options as additional terms within the [blank] tags to the question and trigger a remarking which will update marks in the appropriate log file.

Dropdown List Marking

When 'Presentation' is set to 'Dropdown Lists' only the first option is correct. The other options act as distractors. All the options are always randomised so that students do not know where the correct answer lies.

Feedback

Feedback includes:

• Tick/Cross show what the student has got right/wrong
• Bold options show the correct answers
• Student mark out of possible number.
• Textual feedback is available for the question as a whole (not individual blanks)
• If standard setting has been used this should be displayed
• List of learning objectives that the question is linked to

Limited Save

After a question has locked it should only be possible to change the following aspects:

• General Feedback
• Status - only 'Normal' or 'Retired' (not 'Incomplete', 'Experimental' or 'Beta')
• Bloom's Taxonomy
• Keywords
• Teams

Please note the correct answers within the [blank] tags are held within the 'Question' field which cannot be altered when locked. If the presentation is set to 'Dropdown Lists' then an academic can include/exclude other answers by correcting in the 'Frequency & Discrimination Report' (see above). Answers cannot be altered when in 'Dropdown List' mode.

Standard Setting

• When 'Mark per Option' is used it should be possible to rate each correct option.
• When 'Mark per Question' is used there is only one rating per question.

Data Format

Correct Answer

Unlike some other question types the 'correct' field does NOT contain the correct answer. Instead the correct answer is contained within the text in the 'option_text' field of the options table.

• Dropdown Lists - the first option in the [blank] tags is the correct answer. Other options, separated with commas, are distractors. All options are automatically randomised when presented to students.
• Blank Textboxes - all the options within the [blank] tags are correct. This allows for synonyms and alternatives to be specified.

Student Answer

Student answer is stored in the 'user_answer' field of the relevant log table. | symbols are used to separate the answers to each blank within the question. There is an initial | symbol at the beginning of the 'user_answer' so this allows it to be exploded in the PHP code and array element 1 will be the first blank.

• u = student has left blank unanswered.