Interactive Questions

Introduction

Instructional Web pages are much more engaging when you present or reiterate major teaching points in the form of questions. Questions force the student to interact with the material and reinforce key concepts. MTX currently supports three different question formats:

• Simple - feedback is progressively disclosed with wrong answers
• Multiple Answer - more than one correct answer is available

Both of these formats can be used for formal on-line testing.

Basic Question Format

The question mark (?) tag is used to begin each question. The tag is followed by letters indicating the correct answer (the letter "c" indicates the third choice, etc.). The text of the question follows on a subsequent line. Questions can include images. Here is an example of these elements:

  ?c
  {=picture=}
  This is the text of the question.

Questions will be automatically numbered from 1, 2, 3, etc. for each document.

Each answer begins with an at sign (@) tag. Each choice is treated as a separate paragraph. The letters A, B, C, etc. are added automatically. Optional feedback is provided as a series of indented lines.

  @Red
     Feedback for Red
  @Green
     Feedback for Green
  @Blue
     Feedback for Blue

There can be as few as 2 choices and as many as 26 (A-Z).

Examples

Simple Questions

This is an example of a simple question with progressive feedback.

  ?c

Question 1 - Single Best Answer

What color is the sky?

A) Red

B) Green

C) Blue

each wrong answer.

Multiple Answer Questions

This is an example of a question with two right answers.

  ?bd

Question 2 - Best 2 Answers

Which of the following are even numbers?

A) One

B) Two

C) Three

D) Four

E) Five

Questions with Images

You can use pictures or hypertext links in any part of a question. Providing feedback with counter example images is one useful technique.

Question 3 - Single Best Answer

This is a picture of:

A) The Moon

B) A Flower

C) Some Trees

Suppressing Feedback

It is sometimes desireable withhold feedback for individual questions or an entire page. For example, you might want to selectively hide the feedback from certain questions as part of a formal evaluation. Students would be required to turn in their answers on a paper grading form. Once the forms had been collected you could release the feedback for review.

Add the "none" switch to suppress feedback for an individual question:

  ?c?none

Here is one of the questions shown above with the feedback turned off:

Question 4 - Single Best Answer

What color is the sky?

A) Red

B) Green

C) Blue

each wrong answer.

Notice that the identity of the correct answer and the feedback text has not been removed from the original MTX file. All you have to do to bring it back is remove the "none" switch. Feedback is also affected by certain layout switches:

  %LAYOUT feedback

Overrides "none" switches for questions on the page and forces all feedback to be turned on.

  %LAYOUT nofeedback

Suppresses all feedback for the page. Has the same effect as adding the "none" switch to every question.

  %LAYOUT print

Suppresses question feedback, navigation links, counter, and the table of contents for the page. This is useful when you want to "pretty print" the page on paper.

Files and File Names

The questions on this page produce twelve extra HTML files, one for each feedback element. The names for these files are assigned automatically when the MTX file is processed. For greatest compatibility, you should limit the length of these file names to eight characters as follows:

• The main page file name
• The question number (1, 2, 3...)
• The answer letter (A, B, C...)

For example, the feedback file for the first answer to question 3 is quest3A.html.

Note that these file names are arbitrary and will change as you add, move, or eliminate questions from the original MTX file. Be sure to update any hypertext links you make to these files when you edit them.