Demonstration: Fill in the blanks item type

A Fill-in-the-blanks item asks the respondent to complete a text by adding the missing words or expressions.

In my quiz entitled Multidiscipline, I have one Fill-in-the-blanks item that I named Past Continuous and Simple Past in a scientific report. I will click on this item so that I can modify it.

Under the Content tab, I wrote the title of this item, and then the text in which I ask the respondents to choose the appropriate past form of the verb from each of the drop-down menus that appear in the text.

Below, in STEP 1 - DEFINE THE TYPE OF BLANKS, I define the way in which the respondents will fill in the spaces:

• With the option Drag and drop, the respondents must choose the words or expressions that are shown above the text and slide them into the empty spaces in the text:  
• With the option Drop-down menu (which I chose for this item), the respondents must choose, for each blank in the text, one answer from among those proposed in the drop-down menu;
• With the option Short answer the respondents must write their answer, without having clues, in the blanks that appear in the text.

Now we go to STEP 2 – ADD TEXT AND BLANKS. First I must add a text, and then create the blanks one at a time by choosing the expressions that I want to hide from the respondents, by clicking on the button Add a blank. A box appears under the text that allows me to edit this blank; I can add several good answers and several wrong answers. If the blank is of the Drop-down menu type, these good and bad answers will be among the potential answers in the menu. If the blanks are of the type Drag and drop, all of the options will be seen on top of the text. If this is a Short answer type of blank, the potential answers will be used in correcting the answers given by the respondent. In all of these situations, it is possible to create a feedback message for all of the good and bad answers. The wrong answers anticipated should reflect the types of errors the respondents are most likely to make. Give them feedback that will explain why they made this mistake. For each of the blanks in a Short Answer item, a general feedback message for all the unforeseen answers is required.

The arrows situated above the editing zone of a blank allow me to move from one blank to another without having to click on each blank in the text. This can be very helpful when I am revising my feedback messages, for example.

In order to delete blanks, I can either select a portion of the text that includes the blanks to be removed, then click on the Delete selected blanks button, or I can click on the button Delete this blank, placed over the blank-editing zone.

And like all the other types of items, the Add-ons button allows me to insert additional information. In the first field for additional information, I added some clues. In the second field, I added the source of the text. For this item, I did not add anything for Media in the header, but I could have added a text, an image or a video.

This type of item includes, under the Parameters tab, in addition to the parameters that are common to all of the question types (Weighting, Automatically start media and Display correct answer), a parameter that only applies to Fill-in-the-blanks items. This allows us to specify whether we want the correction of the respondent’s answer to take into consideration upper and lower case, or punctuation. For this item, I did not check either option.

Now, let’s look at the Preview to see how this item will appear in my published quiz. The additional information that I provided appears when the respondent clicks on the words Clues and Sources on the top part of quiz. Under the text of the question, we see the text with the blank spaces. There is a drop-down menu for each of the blanks.

I try out a few quick answers. And when I click on the Submit button, the feedback messages are displayed as they are in the other item types: Correct answer in green for a good reply and Incorrect answer in red otherwise, followed by either a green circle or a red square depending on whether the answer is valid or not. And finally, a feedback message that I wrote specifically for this answer.

And there you have the Fill-in-the-blanks item!