Category Archives: short-answer free text questions

Establishing a free-text version of the force concept inventory

The Force Concept Inventory, established by Hestenes et al. (1992) is the original and best well known concept inventory. The idea is that you use the FCI pre- and post-instruction, asking students a bunch of questions which give you a … Continue reading

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Evaluation, evaluation, evaluation

Despite my recent ‘rants of the day’, I think it is vitally important that we try our best to evaluate our assessment practice. There is some good, innovative practice out there, but it can still be very tempting to confuse … Continue reading

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Transforming Assessment webinar

I gave a webinar yesterday in the ‘Transforming Assessment’ series, on “Short-answer e-assessment questions: six years on”. The participants were lovely and I was especially pleased that there were lots of people I didn’t know. There is a recording at http://bit.ly/TA5J2013 if you’ve … Continue reading

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Automatic marking of essays

I am grateful to Carol Bailey (see previous post) who, following a discussion over lunch, sent me a link to an extremely interesting paper: Vojak, C., Kline, S., Cope, B., McCarthey, S. and Kalantzis, M. (2011) New Spaces and Old … Continue reading

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Eight maids a-Milking – part 2

Day 8b. Using PMatch for short-answer free-text questions. As promised, what I’d like to do is to give you an example of the answer matching for a real question, based on real student responses.

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Eight Maids a-Milking – part 1

Day 8a. Free text marking of short answer questions.  I’ve already talked about the automatic marking of short answers quite a lot on this blog so today, the first day of 2013, I’d like to do two slightly different things … Continue reading

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Using pattern matching software

PMatch is a new Moodle question type (based on OpenMark’s pattern matching question type that is currently in use at the Open University for the short-answer free text questions that I have written). There is more information here. Follow the … Continue reading

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Why don’t more people use short-answer free-text questions?

At CAA 2012 I gave a paper with the title ‘Short-answer e-assessment questions : five years on’  in which I discussed OU work in this area. There was a  lot of interest in what I said, especially concerning evaluation findings. However I wanted to … Continue reading

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Use of capital letters and full stops

For the paper described in the previous post, I ended up deleting a section which described an investigation into whether student use of capital letters and full stops could be used as a proxy  for writing in sentences and paragraphs. We … Continue reading

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Student engagement with assessment and feedback: some lessons from short-answer free-text e-assessment questions

Sorry for my long absence from this blog. Those of you who work in or are close to UK Higher Education will probably realise why – changes in the funding of higher education in England mean that the Open University … Continue reading

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