[New Quizzes] Attached questions stay fixed to stimulus in item bank

What I want to be able to do is attach questions to a stimulus, then create an item bank of the stimuli with the associated questions fixed to each specific stimuli, to randomise the questions. This feature would really provide more robust, deep learning assessment.

 

Currently,  with Item Banks and New Quizzes in general, they will always save as separate pieces instead of one cohesive whole since Stimuli and Questions themselves are separate in the system. 

36 Comments
jeannette_lawle
Community Novice

Item sets where students are provided with a situation, asked "what happens" in one question and "why" in the second are a standard tool to get at higher level thinking. They've been an educational best-practice for decades. Canvas is the only LMS out of the 5 I've used that does not have that functionality. They need to create a way to either have multi-part questions, or to rigidly connect questions to create sets. The current "quiz" system and test banks are nearly useless for anything beyond the lowest cognitive levels because they don't allow for interconnected problems. Either you have a fixed assessment with the associated cheating issues because all of the students have the same questions in the same order, or you use banks to randomize questions to address cheating and abandon educational-best practice for assessment. We shouldn't be forced to make that choice.

clarson1
Community Explorer

I want this.  Currently, you can put a stimulus in an item bank, but I have no idea why.  All it does is pull up the title, instructions, and body.  The questions are not associated.

I would use stimulus much more often if I could randomly pull a stimulus and its associated questions.

dalston1
Community Participant

I need this to happen. I am making my item banks with the stimulus in them. If I could attach them to the specific questions they go with, that would be very helpful.

CarlaD07
Community Explorer

Agree! As is, I currently do not understand the ability to add a stimulus to an item bank. Without a means to connect the Stimulus to questions, a teacher is better off copying the Stimulus into each individual question. Or the teacher has to create an item bank for each Stimulus and then only have the questions that pertain to that Stimulus in the item bank, which could quickly become very cumbersome.

Being able to connect a Stimulus to a set of questions, and then have it randomly choose a set number of connected questions to present to a learner would provide teachers with greater flexibility.

 

mvanmatre
Community Participant

Seems logical - keep like things together.

petern
Community Contributor

Great idea that would also help with another idea.  Lots of science/maths quizzes use formula questions.  The variables in the formula questions could be defined in a linked stimulus, so that multiple formula questions could be asked using the same variables.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Grouped-Formula-Questions-Shared-Set-of-Define...

alan_brooks
Community Member

I assume that the fact that you can already create a bank of stimuli (even though you can't add all or randomly select from that bank) means that there are plans to implement this feature in the future. The real holy grail will be when you can chain stimulus and question banks. e.g. You could create a quiz that pulls X number of random stimuli from a stimulus bank and each stimulus pulls X number of random questions from a question bank.

jmattern
Community Participant

When I saw that it was possible to attach questions to a stimulus and then add stimuli to item banks, I excited by the possibilities. My disappointment in the fact that attached questions don't "stick" to stimuli in item banks is immeasurable. It almost seems pointless to be able to bank stimuli without this feature (I realize item banks are useful for organization, but I would venture to guess that many people use banks for the randomization aspect as well).

aadams6
Community Novice

It would be helpful, especially from a security standpoint, if we could attach multiple numerical answer questions - in a specific order- to a stimuli, and thus we could create multiple "similar" stimuli in an assessment, and pull from those when creating a quiz.  I will be doing a work-around, which creates way more work for the instructors, since everything will have to be manually graded - the exact opposite of what is intended in moving our quizzes to Canvas.

dalston1
Community Participant

This would be very helpful to English teachers for passage analysis. At this point, it's easier to use the method I used with the old quizzes, attaching the passage to the top of each question. This is not as user friendly for the students, so I would like to be able to use the stimulus for this.