Demonstration: Short answer type item

A Short-answer item asks the respondent to write a short answer to a given question.

Here is a quiz entitled Multidiscipline containing a Short-answer item entitled Past participle agreement.

Under the Content tab, you find a field for writing the title of the item and another for stating the question. In this item, I ask the respondents to conjugate the past participle of a verb.

Under the question statement, we can give any answers, good or bad, that we imagine the respondents might give for this question. For this item, I have anticipated three answers: agreement of the past participle with a feminine singular subject, the word elle (which is the correct answer); agreement with the masculine singular, with the word air (which is the most frequent error); and the infinitive (not conjugated) form of the verb, for those who don’t understand the concept of past participle agreement. For each of these potential answers, I have written a pertinent message. A text box at the bottom of the screen also allows me to compose a general message for all of the responses that I had not anticipated.

Now I go to the Add-on tab. In the first field for additional information, on top, I indicated the source of the sentence, which I took from a quiz about past participles created by the CCDMD. Farther down, in the zone Media in the header, I added a purely decorative image.

This type of item includes, under the Parameters tab, in addition to the parameters that are common to all of the question types, a parameter that is specific to this type of item, which asks if you wish the corrector to take upper and lower case letters, and punctuation into consideration. For this item, did not click either option.

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 is specific to this type of item, which asks if you wish the corrector to take upper and lower case letters, and punctuation into consideration. For this item, did not click either option.

Let’s now take a look at a Preview of how this item will appear in the published quiz. At the top, the word Source is clickable. It shows the information that I wrote in the More Information field under the Add-ons tab. The decorative image, which I put in the section Media in the header, appears above the question statement. The respondent must write his or her answer in the text box under the question statement. I wrote the word choquée in the feminine singular form, because the past participle agrees with the word elle.

And what does the correction say? I get the message, Correct answer, written in green. My answer is preceded by a green circle. If I had given a wrong answer, I would have received the message Incorrect answer, in red and it would have come after a red square. The feedback message that I wrote for this answer is shown below.

And that was the Short-answer item!