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 Continue reading
Tag Archives: question
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 Cloze is especially Continue reading
Quiz Builder is making quiz authoring three times easier
Last month we completed our Quiz Builder project. The aim was to make quiz authoring easier, and to increase quality by encouraging authors to choose the highest-quality available questions in preference to writing new ones.
Did it work? Here are the monthly statistics for February, compared with the same month last year:
February of | 2014 | 2013 |
Quizzes compiled | 210 | 187 |
Questions authored | 503 | 1382 |
New questions per quiz | 2.4 | 7.4 |
Authors created approximately as many quizzes as last Feb (within normal variation) but they Continue reading
Introducing Question Bombs
We now have an astonishing 288,000 questions in the Yacapaca question bank. Many of them were written by truly talented authors and do a great job of formative assessment.
Some questions, unfortunately, weren’t. And don’t.
I have now recruited the most brutal critics on the planet to weed out the sub-standard questions: your students. Continue reading