"Designing effective online questions in quantitative subjects: pedagogy and programming."

Dr. Martin Greenhow, Brunel University

13 November 2006

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This talk will describe developments in Mathletics, a freely-available computer-aided assessment (CAA) system that exploits the open code facilities of Question Mark Perception by using random parameters with all question components, including equations written in MathML and diagrams written in SVG. Thus each of the existing 1700 question styles realises to thousands or even millions of questions for the students, each with rather full feedback that seeks to alert the student to where they have gone wrong by recognising common mistakes or mal-rules.

Pedagogic issues such as choice of question type and "reverse engineering" to keep control of arithmetic/algebraic difficulty will be discussed. The technology, and much of the pedagogy, is exportable to other disciplines where quantitative methods are taught.