Embedded Answers (Cloze) question type

Embedded answers (Cloze) questions consist of a passage of text (in Moodle format) that has various answers embedded within it, including multiple choice, short answers and numerical answers.

There is currently no graphical interface to create these questions - you need to specify the question format using the text box or by importing them from external files.

Lots of people suggest that Hot Potatoes software is the easiest way to create Embedded answer (Cloze) questions. Once you have created your questions on your PC, you can then import them into into Moodle's quiz module.

Import Limitation: You can only import one Embedded Answer question at a time. So if you were thinking of creating a .txt file to import several of these questions at one time it won't work.

Format

The Moodle help documentation for Cloze questions gives an example.

NB: Be careful when copying a cloze type question into the WYSIWYG HTML editor, as line breaks tend to get added, which destroys the question.

Examples

Match the following cities with the correct state:

• San Francisco: {1:MULTICHOICE:=California#OK~Arizona#Wrong}
• Tucson: {1:MULTICHOICE:California#Wrong~%100%Arizona#OK}
• Los Angeles: {1:MULTICHOICE:=California#OK~Arizona#Wrong}
• Phoenix: {1:MULTICHOICE:%0%California#Wrong~=Arizona#OK}

The capital of France is {1:SHORTANSWER:=Paris#Congratulations!~%50%Marseille#No, that is the second largest city in France (after Paris).~*#Wrong answer. The capital of France is Paris, of course.}.

If the correct answer contains { } # ~ / " or \ you will have to escape them by putting a \ in front of each such character. In the feedback ~ and } must be escaped otherwise it will be interpreted as the next answer or end of the short answer section respectively. Quotation signs: " can lead to trouble anyhow in both places. Use the HTML entity: & quot; (without the space between & and quot;).

Please note that this does not cover the Numerical type question.

Detailed syntax explanations

1. all question items within a cloze-type question are coded inside curled braces { }
2. the number which appears between the opening brace and the colon {1: is the weighting of that item; if it is set at 1 for all the items, it needs not be specified, so you can have {:
3. after the colon we have the item question type: MULTICHOICE, SHORTANSWER, NUMERICAL
4. NOTE.- If you have installed the REGEXP question type plugin you can also use the REGEXP question type
5. the syntax for MULTICHOICE and SHORTANSWER is the same; the only difference is in the displaying of the item to the student
6. the order of the various answers is indifferent (except if you want a catch-all for wrong answers, see #12 below)
7. a correct answer is preceded with the equal sign = or a percentage (usually %100%)
8. a wrong answer is preceded with nothing or a percentage (usually %0%)
9. you can allocate some points between 0 and 100 to some answers, if you put the appropriate percentage
10. all answers except the first one are separated from one another by the tilde ~ sign
11. answers can be followed by an optional feedback message, preceded with the # sign; if there is no feedback message, the # sign can be present or absent, it does not matter
12. note that the feedback message is displayed in a small popup window (if and when feedback has been declared accessible to the students in the Quiz settings) upon mouse hovering. The popup window has a title "feedback" and you can use HTML tags to format your feedback. In some browsers (For example IE5.5) the form fields can cover part of the feedback windows. It can help to not have the formfields for the answers too close to each other.
13. in the SHORTANSWER type you may want to put a catch-all (wrong) answer in order to send a "wrong, try again" feedback; you can do this by inserting an asterisk * as the very last expected answer in your formula
14. unfortunately in MULTICHOICE MODE it is not possible to get the answers to be scrambled
15. unfortunately in SHORTANSWER mode it is not possible to make the answers case-sensitive except by using a workaround explained in this thread)

See also

This information was drawn from:

• Using Moodle Is there a guide to using the cloze format? forum discussion
• Using Moodle Cloze-type question syntax forum post