Recently one of our users wrote the following at the start of her quiz:

“The right/wrong questions on this quiz will be corrected by my own personal correction robot. The written (or typed) questions will be corrected by me. Only then will your final score be known.

This is an example of the happy cooperation of artificial intelligence and old-fashioned teacher brain, working in harmony. My correction robot works with phenomenal speed, giving you immediate feedback. I plod along like a middle-aged woman (funny, that).

Sometimes, my correction robot is a little lacking in intuition. She will mark you wrong, for instance, if you misspell a word. Don’t worry, if I notice that this has happened to you, I shall override her and give you full marks; that is, so long as the word you have misspelt bears some resemblance to the correct answer.

So take it easy and don’t stress if you make a small insignificant error. Human intuition is still involved and my aim is to award you as many points as possible.

Kind regards and best wishes from your (old-fashioned) teacher and your (up-to-the-minute) correction robot.”

(By Roslyn G, used with permission)

I found this quite funny and thought I’d explain how things work in the background.

If you are a pro member, like this user is, than you can have the answers recorded. You can either create a class, share the quiz with Google Classroom or have anonymous answers recorded (you can ask for the name at the beginning of the quiz).

You can decide if users get immediate feedback and see the score or not.

In any case, as a teacher you will see the given answers by clicking on the “Grade” icon in your dashboard:

If you create a cloze test, where students have to write the answer in the gaps themselves, you can have multiple correct answers (useful for alternate spellings):

Separate the alternative correct answers with #. Highlight the whole group of words before clicking the “Create gap word” button.

Examples:
Yellow is a bright color#colour
I live here#there#at home.

The “correction robot” will now mark both options as correct.

NEW: If your students submitted the answers and you noticed that some students entered another spelling and you didn’t add that to the alternative spellings, you can now add it later using the hashtag and when you save the quiz, it will automatically update the score and the answer will now display for all students who used this different spelling as correct.

Note, when answers have already been submitted and you want to edit a quiz, you get this warning:

This warning means, that you shouldn’t add additional questions or clozes, but you may still do some changes to the formatting, rephrase a question or add alternative answers as mentioned above.

Finally, this teacher mentioned that written questions will be corrected by her. She is referring to the open-ended/essay questions. The answers for these questions can also be annotated inside Learnclick, by going to the details page (clicking on “username”) on the grade page.

Learnclick can save time grading. Use these options and ask us if anything remains unclear.

Make sure you include a variety of listening material for practice, e.g. songs, news, dialogues, etc. They should get exposed to different accents and voices. Try to find material that interests them.

In order for students to improve their listening skills, it’s not enough to just have them listen passively. They must be active in their listening and think of answers, opinions, etc. Here is a list of question types you can create.

1. Use multiple choice quizzes to check for meaning. For example, ask what the meaning of an idiom is that was used in the recording.
2. Use open-ended why questions. For example “Why did the man not have time for eating lunch?”
3. Who said what? Write down a sentence that was in the dialogue and use the multiple choice question type to list all the possible people who might have said that sentence.
4. Which statements are true? Use the question type “Checkboxes (several answers correct)” and have several correct and wrong answers.
5. Ask your students to fill in the blanks. This will help them focus on the text at word level. They can help students with learning new vocabulary or grammar points.
   
   The text can either be taken directly from the transcript or you can make up your own, based on the transcript. If the goal isn’t for students to practice their writing, you can also have them choose from a dropdown or use the drag & drop question type.
6. Have them write an essay where you ask them about their opinion.

With learnclick.com you can not only create all the question types mentioned above easily, but you can also embed videos from youtube or upload a mp3 file to our server and have it play inside the quiz.

As a pro member you can have the answers recorded. If you choose to ask open-ended/essay questions, you can annotate the text and have the students view your feedback as a pdf file.

The Learnclick Quiz Creator is more versatile than you might think…

Recently a teacher asked the following question:

What would be the best way to set up the type of question below.

Identify the subject and verb in the sentence below:

Our answer: I suggest using the question type Generated Dropdowns.

You can simply paste your table into the textbox and then create some empty spaces (for the wrong answers) and mark those plus the correct answers as gaps:

This is how it will look like:

Other tips: How to create jumbled sentences Not sure how to create a question? Feel free to ask us.

Creating quizzes for embedding into a website has been possible for some time now. How to find the embed code (iframe) is explained here. You can find a number of quizzes that are embedded this way on some of the websites created by our users: https://www.learnclick.com/site/clients.

We’re excited about our new feature that let’s you record the user input.

Have you ever wondered how many of your site visitors actually try to take a quiz and if they managed to answer most of the questions correctly? You could also use this feature for creating surveys… Find out more about recording anonymous answers.

Guest post by Mark Souter, psychology and sociology teacher

Running classroom experiments can be even more problematic for psychology teachers than it is for chemistry and physics teachers. Whilst we do not have to worry about fire and acid, the chances of something going awry in terms of an unexpected result are much higher. Given the difficulty in isolating the many variables of humanity, and the practical and ethical difficulties of pushing people into a test tubes, demonstrating cause and effect can be tricky. We have our old standby of the ‘Stroop effect’, which is based on a reliable, almost physiological effect. I have different but equally reliable experiment, which also makes a powerful point about learning. It is based on ‘levels of processing’ (Craik and Lockhart, 1972). One thing I must not do is tell the students what the experiment is about beforehand, but (SPOILER ALERT!) for the purposes of this blog, here comes that explanation.

Figure 1 (source)

Different types of Information are processed by the brain at different levels. At the lowest level there is visual information. In the experiment this is triggered by asking participants to answer questions about the appearance of a word. For example, they are shown the word EGG, and asked “Does this word contain the letter ‘E’?”(part of the briefing before the start is that there are no trick questions, and an obvious answer will be correct). At the next processing level is auditory information. For example, the word ‘should’ is shown, followed by the question “Does this word rhyme with ‘wood’?” The highest level is semantic, though the questions remain purposefully easy. They might be shown the word “ROBIN” followed by the question “Is this a type of bird?”

A further control is to emphasise that this is not a test of any individual. Students at this stage of their learning can be extremely competitive. To reduce this as a factor, I disappoint and confuse them by insisting that their answer sheets are anonymous. If I am in a ‘Barnham’ mood I ostentatiously destroy all of the answer sheets, and then hand out another response form. This has list 30 words they were shown, mixed with another 30, randomly dispersed distractor items. (I once made the mistake of telling them this ratio and the scores increased to almost 100%, which is suggests interesting things about the difference between recollection and recognition but completely undermined the purpose of the experiment!) They have to check off words from the previous task, and they only get 2 minutes to do this. When the time is up I again insist that the response sheets remain anonymous. This especially confounds them because they wonder how I could generate comparisons without names. This is an important part of a psychology lesson as it emphasises a particular type of experimental design (‘within subjects’), but it also avoids ethical issues about revealing who did poorly in this task.

The results invariably show that the ‘deeper level’ questions, even though they are made easy, correspond to greater recall of the words they relate to. So strong is this effect that in a class of less than 20 students it is unlikely that anyone remembers more of the lower level question-word pairs (I usually lump them together for the sake of simplicity, but the longer version with all three types of question-word combinations the visual and auditory scores fall into line).

Levels of Processing and Cloze Tasks

The relevance of this for Cloze Tasks is that even apparently trivial levels of testing can be effective in increasing recall. When the student has to consider the meanings of words, they have to use thinking at the deepest level. In contrast, for example, a word-search task does not do this: I could get 10 year olds to complete a word search for Latin words, or even random strings of letters (though this would stretch short-term memory). Once the meaning of the word is involved a different level of learning is engaged. This is one reason why I like the ‘generate dropdowns’ feature for drop-down cues in Learnclick. Even though the correct answer may seem ‘obvious’ (for example when a noun is required and the other choices are adjectives or verbs) the student is exposed to other key terms because since they are automatically selected from elsewhere in the text.

It’s this easy – just click the ‘generated dropdown’ option! Here’s one I prepared earlier…

This effect may be more powerful for language teaching. For example, if the answer is selected by distinguishing terms through consideration of grammar (e.g. between verbs, connectives, pronouns etc.), the deep level processing of this aspect of language is going to be effective. I am a big fan of flash cards (which also work well as a web-based task), but Cloze Tasks add a deeper level of processing because they embed the words in a particular context. The context supports the thinking process as alternative solutions are contemplated, creating a virtuous circle of thinking. Furthermore, seeing the words in a full context also exposes the student to models of language use. This is as important for my psychology students (particularly in the context of a local culture that does not emphasise the important of literacy), as it might be for language teachers. I think the rest of the teaching profession has some important lessons to learn from our TEFAL/EAL colleagues, and the benefits of Cloze Tasks for learning (not just for teaching) is one of them!

The teacher still has an important task to manage – the level of difficulty needs to strike an important balance between being too easy or too difficult. Easy tasks are demotivating (and possibly even insulting!). Tasks which are too difficult are also demoralising (see ‘Learned Helplessness’ below). The ‘sweet spot’ is not necessarily mid-way between the two. There is evidence of a phenomenon called ‘learned industriousness’ where some degree of failure in the context of success at difficult tasks creates a greater sense of reward and this increased motivation.

Motivation is the key to learning. One of my (hyperbolic) homilies is that teaching people who do not want to learn is the worst job I’ve ever had, but teaching people who do want to learn is the best.