Branching and Skipping
The feedback mechanism allows you jump to another part of the quiz based on an evaluation. The jump can be to another question, to another page or to another piece of feedback. The evaluation will usually be whether a single score is greater or less than a particular value, but can also include more complex conditions (And, Not, Or).
Here's an example quiz, where we ask a first question (the Screener). If the quiz taker does well, we skip to an advanced question, where he does poorly, we ask an easier question. Here's what the quiz looks like in Question Writer.
There are a few things happening here.
Firstly the score variable 'Screener' is associated with the Partial Credit question. Any score achieved here is associated with this score.
In the feedback node, we check to see if the score is greater than 6 - if so, we branch to the 'Population' question. If not the user moves onto the Multiple Choice question, and the branching take place after the question, to skip the Population question.
Notice the Population and Vatican questions have metadata associated with them - this is so we can give them specific names. The name must the same in the Branch action as it is in the Quesiton Metadata Title, the Page Title, or the Feedback identifier.
Make sure to use the latest version (4.0.3819+) when trying out the branching features.
Posted by Alexander on June 16, 2010 | Branching and Skipping| TrackBack
Custom Feedback
Custom Feedback is a powerful new feature in Question Writer 4 but there's only one thing you need to remember to use it effectively. With Custom Feedback, an evaluation is made, and if the evaluation is true, the feedback is displayed. The evaluation is usually to check if a score is greater or less than a particular value; the feedback is usually just content displayed on the screen. Remember this, and you'll have about 80% of the usefulness of this feature. I'll talk about the other 20% later below.
Let's have a look at an example. Here's an Italy quiz with 5 questions, I've labelled three to be scored as 'Geography' and two to be scored as 'History'.
The first piece of feedback is used to display the separate scores for history and geography. The condition node is empty and so it always evaluates as true. The feedback is thus always shown.
The second piece of feedback evaluates the 'geography' score, and if it is less than 20 the condition evaluates to 'true' and so displays the simple message. The third piece of feedback does the same, but for the 'history' score.
As for the other 20% . . . there are two things to know. The Condition can contain And, Or and Not nodes, so evaluations can take place that depend on multiple scores, or one thing being true and another being false, or any one of a number of things being true. The feedback can also redirect the user to another part of the quiz - maybe to bounce the user back into the question if he answered incorrectly, or to skip a question based on a response given by the user. More about this in a later blog post about Skipping and Branching.
Links: Try out the quiz in your browser. Download the source (.qwz) for the quiz.
Make sure to use the latest version of QW when using feedback (Currently QW Beta 4.0.3812)
Posted by Alexander on June 8, 2010 | Custom Feedback| TrackBack