Category Archives: student engagement

Repeated and blank responses

The figure shown on the left requires a bit of explaining. The three columns represent student responses at 1st, 2nd and 3rd attempt to a short-answer free-text question in formative use. Green represents correct responses; red/orange/yellow respresent incorrect responses. The reason I’ve used different … Continue reading

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Can formative-only assignments tell you about student misunderstandings?

When I was doing the original analysis of student responses to Maths for Science assessment questions, I concentrated on questions that had been used summatively and also on questions that required students to input an answer rather than selecting a … Continue reading

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Helpful and unhelpful feedback : a story of sandstone

One of the general findings that is coming out of my evaluation of student responses to multi-try e-assessment questions relates to that wonderful thing that I’ll call the ‘Law of unintended consequences’. I used to think that ‘students don’t read … Continue reading

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decease or decrease?

Back in 2007, we were observing students attempting our short-answer free-text e-assessment questions in a Usability Laboratory. One student repeatedly typed ‘decease’ instead of ‘decrease’ and he didn’t realise he was doing it. At the time, the answer matching was linguistically … Continue reading

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Spelling mistakes in student responses to short-answer free-text e-assessment questions

I get asked a lot about how the answer-matching copes with poorly spelt responses to our short-answer free-text responses, and this is certainly something that used to worry me. Fortunately all the evidence is that our answer matching has coped remarkably well with poor … Continue reading

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More on length of student answers

So what else affects the length of student responses to short-answer free-text questions?

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How long is short?

I’ve been looking at student responses to our short-answer free-text questions. I’ll start by considering something simple; how long are the responses?

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When do people engage with diagnostic quizzes?

What follows is an example of a very simple investigation into student engagement with e-assessment.

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