NUMÉRICO

Numerical CLOZE questions

From the student perspective, a numerical CLOZE question looks just like a short-answer Cloze question. (CLOZE can also be called embedded or fill in the blanks. You can see the Cloze page for more general CLOZE info that even applies to the numerical form.)

The difference is that numerical answers are allowed to have an accepted error. This allows a continuous range of answers to be set. You can also express your answer in some different numerical formats. 23.4 23,4 (some countries use , as a decimal separator) and 2.34E+1 (meaning 2.34*10^1) would be interpretted as the same.

More examples:
 0.5 accepts .5 0.5 ,5 0,5 0.500 5e-1 5E-1 but not 1/2 50% 
 50% accepts 50% 50.0% 5E1% 50/100 even 50/1000 50 but not 500/1000 0.5
 1/2 accepts 1/2 1/3 1twenty but not 2/4 0.5 0,5 3/6 50% ½
 ½ accepts ½
 HALF doesn't even accept HALF (maybe 0?)
If you want to accept several variants you can have them in the same {} but be careful!

The writing of a NUMERICAL CLOZE question is about the same as the other CLOZE questions and they can be mixed in the same question.

You write your question/incomplete text and where the student is to enter the numerical answer you write (Preferably in the source code mode, the RTF editor can insert linebreaks that make the question not function. So the linebreak is for readability in the example box below. A problem with these questions is the readability of the code! ):

{2:NUMERICAL:=23.8:0.1#Feedback for correct answer 23.8
~%50%23.8:2#Feedback for ½credit near correct answer}. 

In this example

• 2: is the question point weight which would say that this question has twice the weight in the final point(s) for this question as other partial answers with weight 1 (or no declared weight you can start {: for weight 1) in the same question.
• NUMERICAL: says what kind of question it is. It must be in CAPS.
• =23.8:0.1 = or %100% means correct if the answer is 23.8 with an accepted error of 0.1, then any number between 23.7 and 23.9 will be accepted as correct. (In the GIFT numerical question one can express an interval like this 13..15 or 14:1 but in CLOZE only 14:1 works.)
• #Feedback for correct answer 23.8 is preceded by #
• ~%50%23.8:2 ~ is the separator for answer alternatives %50% means this answer would get 50% of the score that the more precise answer had gotten. Because the tolerans here is 2, 21.8 to 25.8 would get this point and feedback

The feedback (which is seen as OverLib popup windows when the user hovers over the answer space) is formatable with HTML tags. For example if you want an exponent, surround it with superscript tags: . You can even include pictures in the feedback popup but you must clean out all " and save while still in code mode (not RTF). This works in feedback popup:

#See this picture:<br><img src=Something.gif />}

but not

#See this picture:<br><img src="Something.gif" />}

(ALGEBRA and TEX filters don't work in the feedback popups, but they can be very useful in the question writing for math/science expressions).

If you want to give feedback for any answer that didn't fit the intervals you already have specified feedback for, add some BIG general intervals, like for positive answers (if they aren't bigger than 20000 you could add:

~%0%10000.0001:10000#Feedback for unspecified not_right answers}

This would give feedback for anything from 0.0001 to 20000.0001 (that hadn't already gotten feedback). I didn't want to include 0 since that special case as well as negative ought to have specific reactions.

~%0%0#Hey! It can't be zero
~%0%-10000.0001:10000#We just want the size here,
   so a negative value is not what we want}

Numerical questions can also have case-insensitive non-numerical answers. This is useful whenever the answer for a numerical question is something like +inf, -inf, (N/A, NaN etc though I don't know when that would be useful)

All the information on this page is based experiences in Moodle version 1.5.3+ (2005060230).