How to Design a TW Edition to Store Exam Questions and Their Answers

[Mohammad]

Purpose: Create a notebook to store exam questions for a course with their answer
Tools: TiddlyWiki, CodeMirror, KaTex, Shiraz, Commander, Section-Editior, Autocomplete

Design Objectives

• A question is stored in single tiddler (I call it QT: Question Tiddler)

  • The QT has colorful tags

    • Easy in green
    • Moderate in yellow
    • Difficult in red

  • The QT has few fields

    • The source: the place you take the question, name of textbook, web, or course pamphlets tiddler
    • The exam : the name of semester, this question is used like Winter 2024, or Fall 2018
    • The description or caption: to store a short description or a longer title for the question
    • The topic refers to course topics like: linear algebra, initial value problems, can store more than one topic

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• The answer tiddler which stores the answer to a question (I call it AT: Answer Tiddler)

  • The AT has few fields
    • question to store the name of tiddler contains the question
    • description to store short description on how problem solved e.g. method
  • The AT transclude the question tiddler
  • The AT uses Section editor when the answer is long or multipart

• On click on an exam e.g. Winter 2024 a tiddler is opened with all questions in that exam are transcluded

• A sidebar tab to show all questions with title, dificullty level, description and list of exams in them this question is used

More input please. What do you think?

[Mohammad]

Further idea: An Exam Maker, Test Maker, or Quiz Generator

A form to get some inputs like:
Exam semester
Topics
Number of questions

and then on press a tiddler is created with random questions selected from the database (all those QTs)

[Scott_Sauyet]

Very interesting ideas!

Would you have students taking the exams/quizzes in this tool, or would you use it to generate printed material for them to use? For text-heavy disciplines (English, history, philosophy [Hi @springer! ], etc.), using the tool for taking the tests would make sense. But for notation-heavy disciplines (math [Hi @Ste_W! ] or chemistry [is this you @Mohammad?], etc.) I can’t see how to teach the students to enter technical notation simply, even if they have KaTex or similar available.

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Another possible extension: Use this to track student’s performance: “Hmm, only 32% of students got full-credit on question 37; I guess it’s not really an easy one. Do I need to spend more classroom time on that section?”

[Ste_W]

I did some messing on this a few years ago for setting and marking maths questions but ground to a halt.
A very work in progress (or not) tiddler here:
https://steachertests.tiddlyhost.com/#Force%20Question%201

https://steachertests.tiddlyhost.com/#Question1

[Mohammad]

Hi Scott,
Well this is a teacher notebook. It used to act as a database for questions with answers.
Thank you for the references. I follow the works by both of them (@Springer and @Ste_W)

[Mohammad]

Thank you for the link and for the Engineer’s Textbook.

[Charlie_Veniot]

I’m a big fan of proximity.

My approach: a question and an answer always exist in the same tiddler. That tiddler is a “deployed” tiddler.

The questions to be deployed, let’s call them repository tiddlers. They might or might not have answers to the questions, but those are meant for the teacher. When the teacher deploys a question tiddler (for an exam/test or assignment), the answer is stripped away.

Something like that.

[Mohammad]

One reason I have separated tiddlers is the are big one. I went through section editor to be able to edit and maintain them. Normally an answer is in range 20-40 lines with several formula.

[Charlie_Veniot]

To explain my rational for anybody interested, otherwise definitely disregard:

Proximity, for me, always takes precedence over the size of any one field (or however many fields).

In one tiddler, the parts (question and answer) will always be together, and the answer will always reflect the question as it existed at the time the answer was created. A self-contained and “forever” together unit.

[Ant]

This is a great idea and something I’d always wanted to be able to easily do.

Suggestions for additional fields:

• Module (Moodle calls these courses) code if such a thing exists – maybe this is covered by topic but the same topic could be covered in different modules (basic/intermediate/advanced whatever)
• Similar questions – I know it’s generally not considered good practice to repeat questions in subsequent years but maybe one has a question where the calculations are the same but the data are different

If exactly the same questions is used (yes, it’s been known…) then include the possibility of recording this in the ‘year’ and/or ‘module’ fields – i.e. multiple values in each field. One could then track the questions used each year and recreate the exam for ‘Fall 2018’ in the future

Many thanks for an interesting idea and thread.

[Ste_W]

@Scott_Sauyet

I can’t see how to teach the students to enter technical notation simply, even if they have KaTex or similar available.

I did this My TiddlyWiki — Experiments and stuff which might be helpful…

https://steachertests.tiddlyhost.com/#Question1

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Ste_W

I did this My TiddlyWiki — Experiments and stuff which might be helpful…

https://steachertests.tiddlyhost.com/#Question1

Oh, that’s great stuff! But do you actually have students using that format in real-time exams?

[Ste_W]

No, I never developed it further, time and a shift in the modules I was teaching.

[Mohammad]

I just remembered some parts of these design have been implemented in TiddlyWiki Garden

Tiddlywiki Garden — demonstrate, practice and learn Filters and CSS

[clsturgeon]

I love this idea and the design ideas behind it.

I have nothing close to it. I created a questionnaire. Not sure any ideas here will help.

https://clsturgeon.github.io/MemoryKeeper#Genealogical%20Questionnaire

[Mohammad]

Interesting design. Thank you for sharing, Craig.

[Ste_W]

A quick search for quizz in the linksTW throws up:

https://ooktech.com/jed/ExampleWikis/Oppiaish%20Thing/

And

http://twiz.tiddlyspot.com/

For something to ponder

[pmario]

@Mohammad

The AT has few fields

• question to store the name of tiddler contains the question
• description to store short description on how problem solved e.g. method

In the AT I would rename description into guidance or guide or may be hint, so it can not be mistaken. – Just an idea

[Springer]

I haven’t had time to follow the whole thread.

I’ll just chime in that there are lots of different kinds of questions, and they may require different kinds of tiddler-structures (of course).

Here’s a set of what I call “Multi-choices” questions, in a fully-functioning higher-ed wiki that has been actively under development for years.

They’re probing for deep comprehension of readings, and structured superficially like “multiple choice” questions — except there’s no process of elimination! Any subset of responses (any number, potentially including none or all) can be correct. So, you could also think of each question as a cluster of true-false questions, independently scored, but with five at a time (on my model) sharing same thematic framing.

(The pedagogical situation is that these are initially discussed in groups, under “open book” classroom conditions, though it’s impossible to do well in real time without advance preparation. Often the juxtaposition of alternate responses to the same basic prompt helps to foster discussion — one student recognizing a claim that was explicit in the text, another noticing that a certain option exaggerates, or smuggles in a concept that’s really accurate only for a prior reading, etc.)

Right now, I’ve only set up the site for self-quizzing purposes, as well as displaying (and printing) in a classroom setting so that answers are available for discussion immediately after papers are submitted. I’ve also printed (customized) exams using list-conditions based on this format.

I’ve not tried to set up anything like a procedure that would allow this to function as an online exam or at-home quiz (say, for a student who has prepared for class but can’t attend due to illness or emergency).

These questions (with answers) are currently each packed into a single tiddler (as preferred by @Charlie_Veniot). Their order and the associated details widgets are currently hard-coded in the body of each tiddler (though the fine-grained contents are actually articulated within an old FileMaker database, which churns out the TiddlyWiki body text).

I’ve considered refactoring into a more fine-grained structure in TiddlyWiki because of the structural complexity of the five multiple-choices options. Clearly it would be super-neat to articulate the data more neatly (either into carefully named fields, or into separate tiddlers) and to be able to shuffle the order of answers, or tweak their presentation details, via template-level changes. Further, if I ever want an automated process for selecting and scoring responses, the current structure would be insufficient — since self-evaluation on the current model is simply a matter of verbal/visual recognition that is available to the student through the detail disclosure GUI of each tiddler.

[Mohammad]

Thank you for your post, the shared wiki and your comments.
My purpose at this stage is to have teacher course notebook, so students do not have direct access to the notebook wiki. The teacher/lecturer/professor uses the wiki as a notebokk for a semester in that the course is taught. It acts as a source for exam questions with solution/answer and grading. The wiki acts as a database for future exams or solved problems selectively exported as pdf/html and distributed during the semester to students in the class.

I found the Grok TiddlyWiki @sobjornstad form of Questions/Answers inspiring, also the TiddlyWiki Garden from kookma library.