"Having the students make their own Q & A quizzes and tests gives them a self-attended activity that alone generally gives more personal satisfaction, more successful results on evaluations and better grades."

It's an interesting direction and the conversation adds some more confirmation of the approach - from Laura Gibbs -

"I've found that students are INCREDIBLY motivated by seeing other students' work. That is real to them in a way that a textbook, say, just is not real somehow. When they see other students' work, they believe in it, and believe that they can do something as good or better themselves."

Question Writer Basic is free to use for this kind of classroom activity and our academic site licenses allow everybody on site to use the Professional version of the software.

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.

Download the source here.

Make sure to use the latest version (4.0.3819+) when trying out the branching features.

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)

Three sample Plugin Questions are provided with Question Writer. Check in the samples directory to open the 'PluginQuestions.qwz' file in Question Writer. View the quiz here, to see how the questions integrate seamlessly into a quiz.

Plugin Questions are created as .swf files - this file contains all the layout code and scoring logic. Question Writer then provides the file with the parameters and options of the question. Take the Horizontal Slider Plugin Question provided with Question Writer for example. The parameters are used to tell it the maximum and minimum values that the slider can take and whether to display the slider's current value. The first option is used to provide a background graphic, and the second option is used to provide the slider button. In this way, the Plugin Question is programmed once, but virtually any type of slider can be created with it using the parameters and options.

To create your own Plugin Question, you'll need the services of a Flash programmer. The interface is described in the Quesiton Writer Manual, and you can also download the source code (.fla) to a sample Plugin Question (The Cycle Plugin Question) as a basis to work from. If this sounds a bit daunting - contact sales@questionwriter.com for a quote on creating a new Plugin Question type for you as a custom development.

Right click on a question (any except Explanation or Essay) to add one or more scores to a question and give the score a name in the properties box. Question Writer will still track the overall score across the quiz, but you'll also be able to reference defined scores by name when evaluating whether to show feedback, or just to display the scores on screen.

For example, imagine you have a geography quiz with questions about two countries, Italy and France. You want to give the quiz taker a breakdown how well they scored on each of the countries. Simply add a score node to each question, giving the name 'France' or 'Italy' depending on the country of the question. On the final page, add two 'Display Score' node with 'France' and 'Italy' as the refences to display the scores back to the user.

Scores can also be examined by the evaluation, and different feedback can be shown according the values of different scores.

You can add Options to the Partial Credit, Matching, Sequencing and Plugin question types. Options allow you to offer alternative types of content as answer options. For example, you could ask a user to sequence a list of images, or match images to names, or use animations or sounds as options for answers.

Right click on a question and choose the 'Add->Option' menu choice. Then you can add text, images, sounds, animations to the option. Here's a short quiz on British Design Classics made using Options. Source

Question Writer still uses the text answers you have defined in the question but adds the options. For matching questions, each match follows the choice. The plugin questions can be programmed to use the options' content in any way. For example the Horizontal Slider Plugin Question uses the first option as the slider background, and the second option as the slider button. More details on Plugin Questions soon!

From there, you can add questions to the page (or drag and drop in existing questions.) Here's what the Italy quiz looks like in the editor, as a two page quiz, with 5 questions on each page. View the Quiz Source

One other thing about using pages - the image zoom functionality will be removed and images will be displayed inline as it can be confusing to have multiple zooming images. You can also take advantage of this when you want some questions to have zooming images, and other not - just put the questions inside pages when you don't want the images to zoom.

Download Question Writer 4

I'll be blogging the new features in detail over the coming weeks, but here's a summary of what's new.

Major New Features
Pages - Pages allow multiple questions to be placed on the same page
Multiple Scores - You can now specify a score variable to be associated with each question - this allows you to maintain multiple scores in the same test.
Feedback - You can now define feedback pages with content to be displayed based on the answers or scores achieved in previous questions.
Branching - Branching allows skipping questions, or jumping to previous questions based on the answers or scores achieved in previous questions.
Plugin Question Type - Plugin Questions allow any question type to be seamlessly integrated into Question Writer. The beta includes 3 sample Plugin Question types. This allows you to write your own question types.
Content Model- Text, images and Flash can now be used together both in question content and answer options. This allows matching images to text/sound for example, or multiple images in the question content.

Minor New Features

PDF Export - Export your Flash quiz inside a PDF document to allow easy e-mailing of quizzes.
Text Colors Override - Override the body, title and feedback colors.
Cross/Ticks - Override the crosses/ticks used in the theme.
Small Fonts - Specify small fonts for easy to read text on small screens and mobile devices.
MP3 Audio - Add audio direct from MP3 files as part of your question.
Respect Newlines - Use HTML text formatting, but respect newlines in the text
Exact Positioning - Choose exact co-ordiantes for images/text to appear on screen.

You can install it side-by-side with your existing Question Writer 3 installation.

Any licenses purchased on or after March 1st, 2010 are eligible for a free upgrade to Question Writer 4 - contact support@questionwriter.com for your updated license.

The Flash quizzes can be run on Macs with full internet capabilities - however they may not run on some of the newer partial internet devices (iPhone, iPad).

directory with your own Flash files.

However, if you haven't got your own set of Flash file, here's an alternative set of icons you can use. To use them, just unzip the file into the directory above, making sure that the older files are overwritten with the new ones.

You'll find that it is helpful to download your tokens (with links, ip addresses and start times) if you need to sort them or export them into another system.

You can also issue tokens to students rather than giving them the web link - the student can then enter the quiz number and token to log on to the quiz. This is helpful if you have a large number of students taking a quiz at the same time - you can direct them all to the same login page, and just give a different token to each student to use as a login password.

Here's the quiz login page address.

http://www.questionwritertracker.com/quiz/.

You'll remember Collator is a PHP application that uses MySQL to store results collected from quizzes in your own database, on your own server. It can be run on its own, or in combination with the backup server to ensure that results are collected even if the server suffers failure.

Here's a changelog of what's new in Collator 1.3 -

* 1.3
* Changed Error Logging to remove uninteresting errors
*
* 1.2
* Added additional identifiers to the email where they are not blank
* Added change IP recorded when resultset comes from backup server
* Added additional Candidate fields written into userdata db fields
* Added fix to XML parsing to allow for special XML characters in ID, also remove spaces after special XML characters
* Added facility to check if e-mail is not provided directly, but referenced by an id
*
* 1.1.1
* Put all the Resultsets into a single SQL query to reduce processing time
* Added ReplyTo header to help with spam rating
* Added MIME header for e-mail to avoid MIME_HEADER_CTYPE_ONLY rating
* Added newline in table for each line - email was being rejected for having lines that were too long
* Externalized e-mail call
* Added duplicate result checking in LogXML function
* Set LogXML to false as a default
* Check PassFail value for PASS/FAIL value - set to pass if value not recognized
* Check for empty name/value pairs generated by old QW quizzes

Just visit the quiz page, and the HTML code is in the box at the bottom of the page. You can copy and paste the HTML code directly into your own webpage.