Thanks for sharing this idea, @scartwright . Would you add to the description a few examples of use cases where an essay questions would not work for this purpose?
@scartwright , thanks for the additional details and the insight into the importance of this new question type for ESL learners. We've moved the idea forward for community consideration. Are you using essay questions in New Quizzes for this purpose in the meantime?
I find that the essay question type works well for short response questions. In new quizzes we can now set word limits to indicate the expected length. I do not believe students see a label calling it an essay question, but there is a open blank for question title that we can fill in with a label such as short response.
My issues with using the "essay" question type in cases like @scartwright mentions is that:
you can't have multiple essay blanks in the same question.
there is no grading option for essays other than manual grading.
@Steven_S mentions that the question title can be used to label the question is "short answer" for the student, but the question titles are only visible to the instructor, not to the students.
@Nyssa73 for multiple short response blanks in the same question you might try a stimulus question with multiple essay questions linked to it. If your short responses are VERY short, you might try the fill-in the-blank question type, which does allow multiple blanks in the same question.
I did not realize the titles only show to instructors. There is not much point in that. Maybe the title will be updated to display to students in the future.
BUT you can type a title into your prompt, and the word count settings help to signal students the expected length. It is not automatically labeled either short response or essay in the student view, so we can use the same question type for both purposes.
Adding a title in with the question prompt is certainly an option. I'm not sure why they made that field visible only to the instructors. Maybe they should rename that field "instructor notes"?
The drawback with using essay questions is that there is no auto-grading option, which makes sense if you are expecting a full essay. The drawback with the short response is that there is no formatting; there is an entry "paragraph" and the entry blanks just come one right after the other. You can't even put in line breaks.
What is really odd, is that I could not see my titles in speedgrader either, so it isn't even an instructor note. There are already grading notes available for instructors on essay questions... I think it might just be because the classic quiz format had titles that defaulted to the word question unless you made changes, and this way any changes are not lost in the importing... BUT, if we do use a title, it makes sense to have it visible to students who are taking, and faculty who are grading, the quiz.
An auto grading option is interesting but how would that work? Integrate a grammar and plagiarism checker for a grammar criteria, and then some form of key word recognition? After some of the cheating I've found (completely random phrases copied from various websites into sentences that are not true but use the right keywords) I would question how accurate that might be.
If your short response is predictable enough you can use the fill in the blank question type, and just put the blank at the end of the question. That type does have some auto-grading. Line breaks are a problem because enter is used to create a blank, and we do not have access to html, but you might have some luck copying and pasting pre-formatted text from word.
@Steven_S I would love to use grading notes! Are these in New Quizzes? I am a curriculum designer and would like to put in notes for the instructors or graders on quizzes such as keywords or how many points to give if the quiz question has multiple parts.
As for short answers -- yes yes!! We want to design questions where students have to identify word(s) such as Quadratus Lumborum and also give a short description of what that is or where it is located. An essay question field it too long. It can work, but it might also make the test rather lengthy. Plus, students would have to continually scroll up to look at the prompt again. Plus, if part of the goal is to see if students remember all of the words (i.e. list all of the muscles involved in ITB syndrome and where they are located), you will give it away if there are a certain number of essay questions. Just, please, create a short answer option!!
This would be somewhere between a "fill in the blank" question and an essay question. I don't want a constrained "fill in the blank" where students are forced to write an exact word-for-word answer. Neither do I want a empty essay box with no guidelines at all. I just need to be able to set some specific fields (lines or boxes in a table) where students can type their answers and I can review them myself. It's maddening to have to dumb down all my quizzes and exams to force them into the very limited options offered by Canvas!
If there were a way to upvote a comment, I would upvote @AndreV . Excellent points!
It would also be nice if we could have grading notes or the ability to use a rubric when grading quizzes. It would allow for more continuity if more than one instructor is using the same exam.
As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.
