Allow New Quizzes fill in the blanks to have multiple blanks on different lines

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 

The old quiz system allows multiple blanks to be placed anywhere within a question; even in a table.  the new system does not.  In the old system I could pose an order of operations questions as:

 

2^2 + 4 -10/3=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]=

[BLANK TO FILL IN]

 

In the new system they have to be on the same line and thus create confusion.  I also cannot have them fill in missing values from a table in the new system either.  The way the old system handled multiple blanks was much more conducive to accurately measuring if students know what to do.

65 Comments
cjustin
Community Member

Allowing line breaks between blanks would greatly enhance the utility of this tool for our upper-level math instructors who have complex multi-part questions. The questions are just not as legible when strung together without any line breaks. I understand why having the entire rich content editor available for fill in the blank would not work well, but adding line breaks alone would be a major improvement.

kschott
Community Member

I agree!  The inability to use different lines like in the old quizzes makes things confusing for the students.

cindyk
Community Participant

This needs to return.  In Geometry, we often supply part of a 2-column proof.  Having the dropdown  or fill in the blank appear directly in the table is much easier for students to understand than constantly having to shift their focus from the proof to their response.  There is so much research on how this divided attention affects learning outcomes, I'm surprised you did not keep this feature.

I won't even go into why the RCE should generally be available for all fill-in-the-blank questions though I do wish mathquill generated latex instead of images to allow for autograding.  Free response gives more information than multiple choice but I hate having to teach kids the syntax of keyboard math.

alissaarcline
Community Participant

Agreed--this feature would be so helpful. We use fill-in-the-blank tables quite often at our institution right now, which is why we have not yet switched over to New Quizzes.

dianeshenosky
Community Member

We use this often in math to do tables for ratios.  We really need this feature in new quizzes.  It seems that this feature has been eliminated. It is hard to create multiple answers to one question.

richard_mellor
Community Member

Yes, this please!

flee1
Community Participant

Please, please, please use the Old Quiz formatting for fill-in-the-blank questions. Doing stimulus questions also does not help if you want students to be able to fill out a table or even use the RCE and MathType. The old system gave us more flexibility, and, honestly, make it easier for a test taker to read a question. In many ways New Quizzes is a lesser version of Old Quizzes. Simpler UI =/= better.

laurence_vannui
Community Member

I couldn't agree more. It's even more annoying when you migrate classic quizzes to new quizzes, because you lose the layout of all the questions where sentences are on different lines. Its confusing for he students, its ugly and the questions are not usable that way 😭. It would be so simple if we could have different blanks on different lines... 

 

Magoosh
Community Member

I 100% support the request for line breaks and rich text formatting in new quizzes fill-in-the-blank questions. On this point, new quizzes is a serious and frustrating downgrade from classic quizzes.

 

sd2737
Community Explorer

Just bizarre that these type of questions weren't implemented with formatting from the beginning.