Numerical

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.)

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.

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):

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

In this example

• 2: is the question point weight which whould 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 weight 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 tht user hovers over the answer space) is formatable with HTML tags. For example if you want an exponent, surround it with superscript tags: . (I don't know it you can use the ALGEBRA and TEX filters 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 ~%0%10000.0001:10000#this would give feedback for anything from 0.0001 to 20000,0001 (that hadn't already gotten feedback).

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)