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grouping questions, limiting responses

grouping questions, limiting responses

by David Winslow -
Number of replies: 4

I posted this question in the wrong forum (site news)...sorry...


1. Is there a way to set up homework/quiz/test questions where some questions are selected randomly from a group of similar questions from a library of questions?

2. Is there a way to limit the number of responses to a question in a homework set before a new question version is generated, i.e. student is given two attempts to answer a homework question. If both attempts are incorrect/partial but not full credit is given, student can stil have unlimited chances to answer question but question is reseeded at each successive attempt with response limited again to two responses.

3. On Webwork 2.20, quiz options states that if number of attempts for quizzes is set to be n>1, it is untested. Does that mean what I think it means...it may not work as requested for n>1??

Thanks,

David Winslow

In reply to David Winslow

Re: grouping questions, limiting responses

by Gavin LaRose -
Hi David,

I recently got some actual documentation for much of the feature set of gateway/quiz assignments on-line at http://devel.webwork.rochester.edu/twiki/bin/view/Webwork/GatewayTesting; you may find there better answers than those I'm including here.

1. It is possible to set up gateway/quiz assignments that draw from a library of questions. This does not, however, work for regular homework assignments. I've described the manner this can be done in the documentation and on a "how to" page at http://devel.webwork.rochester.edu/twiki/bin/view/Webwork/ProblemGroupHowTo. The general idea is to define some sets of questions that aren't assigned to any users, from which problems on the assigned set can be drawn.

2. I'm not sure I understand your question about the limited number of responses to a question on an assignment. On homework assignments the number of attempts per problem can be specified; after the student has submitted a problem that number of times s/he can check further attempts, but not submit them for a grade.

On gateway/quiz assignments, all problems in the set are submitted at the same time, so setting the number of allowed attempts determines the number of times that version of the assignment can be submitted. Thus, if the Attempts per Version parameter (which I renamed Number of Graded Submissions per Test in WeBWorK 2.4) is set to 2, then when a student starts a test s/he will be able to submit it for a grade twice, in exactly the same manner as if the test as a whole were a problem that allowed two submissions.

Once those two submissions have been used, the student can't submit the gateway/quiz for a grade any more, but may be able to check her/his answers (c.f. http://devel.webwork.rochester.edu/twiki/bin/view/Webwork/GatewayTesting#Showing_Student_Scores_and_Work). Then, depending on the settings of the Time Interval for New Versions and Number of New Versions per Time Interval characteristics of the assignment, s/he will be able to start a new version of the assignment that will also allow two graded attempt submissions.

3. There may have been some issues with setting the number of attempts for gateway/quizzes in WeBWorK 2.2 to be more than one, but I actually don't recall if that was the case. We don't have any situations where we use that, so my memory is not strong on this topic. As of the current version of the system (2.4, which is in development and should be released this spring/early summer (that is, spring/summer 2007)) I'm pretty sure that multiple attempt quizzes work as advertised. I think they worked in WeBWorK 2.2 as well, but I didn't test them well for that release.

As a side note, gateway/quiz assignments with problems that didn't have weight one were not supported in WeBWorK 2.2, though it's not hard to patch the system to make them work. I believe that they too work as expected with the latest (forthcoming) release.

Gavin
In reply to Gavin LaRose

Re: grouping questions, limiting responses

by David Winslow -

Gavin,

That answers most of my questions. I do now see how to limit the number of attempts for a homework problem, but what I would like to see is if a student is limited to three attempts to respond to a homework problem in a set, he can then retry a different version of the problem (for those alogortihmically generated) and can have three more attempts at that new versioning. Better yet, if he got the problem correct, he can request a different versioning of the problem to make sure he has a grasp of the concepts and can do a second similar problem of the type. We are presently using an online delivery system that has this feature and I think it is a nice one for modeling homework assignments. Is that possible with homework sets in Webwork?

I am also including a screenshot of what I see in Webworks 2.2 with regard to setting attemps per version for a quiz.

Attachment version_set.jpg
In reply to David Winslow

Re: grouping questions, limiting responses

by Gavin LaRose -
Hi David,

Unfortunately, versioning in WeBWorK is not currently implemented for homework sets, so for regular homework-type assignments a student will end up being limited to her/his available set plus any "guest" logins that s/he can work to check her/his knowledge.

There's no technical reason why versioning couldn't be added to homework sets, however, subject to resolving a few logical and technical questions. One that jumps out at me immediately is whether versioning would be per problem (as you've described) or per set (as is currently implemented with the gateway/quiz assignments).

You're absolutely correct about the warning about the attempts per version on gateway/quiz assignments in WeBWorK 2.2. As I noted before, I hadn't tested multiple attempts per version carefully in that version of the software. I believe it worked, but do not now remember if there were any troubles. Please feel free to try it, and if it doesn't seem to be doing the right thing let me know and we can work out how to fix it.

Alternately, I believe WeBWorK 2.4 should be out sometime this spring or early summer, and I believe gateway/quiz assignments with multiple attempts per version work fine in that version.

Gavin
In reply to David Winslow

Re: grouping questions, limiting responses

by Davide Cervone -
David:

There is another approach possible for this that I have discussed in the past. See http://wwrk.maa.org/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1950 and https://devel.webwork.rochester.edu:8002/webwork2_files/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2775 (see my response hear the bottom).

These point you to a macro file that I wrote that allows you to set up a problem that gives the student a choice of several related files that they can choose from. It is not exactly what you are looking for, but could be modified to work more like what you want.

Davide