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Category: Yacapaca

  • How long should a homework take?

    It turns out there is actually an answer to this question, and it’s “15 minutes”. Here is my evidence: I looked at 6448 homework assignments that had been completed on

  • How to calibrate quiz percentages to levels or grades

    If you look in your gradebook for any given student set, you will see that all the results are reported in the grade scheme you chose for that set. It’s easy to take that for granted and not think about how it is achieved – at least I hope it is, because we have worked…

  • Beginners’ guide to Checkbox questions

    Checkbox questions (aka “choose-n”) are our second most-popular question type. They are simple and versatile, and you can often replace a whole list of choose-1 questions with a simple choose-n. They also contain a few booby-traps for the

  • A wee note for authors about time and information

    When writing any part of a question, please think about timeframe, and the student’s perception of time. In the case of a feedback statement, you have perhaps 10-20s during which the student can remain focused on the current question and the issue of “why did I just get that wrong”? In this time, you can…

  • Beginners’ guide to Cloze questions

    Beginners’ guide to Cloze questions

    Cloze or ‘gap fill’ questions are staple of language teaching, but they have many uses. For example: Vocabulary, especially in MFL Word suffix/prefix, e.g. in grammar or for chemical terms Numerical input Knowledge where correct spelling will be rewarded in an exam Where guessing would be too easy in a multiple choice question Yacapaca’s implementation of…