The Waldens Paths Quiz Engine

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The Waldens Paths Quiz Engine

• Avital Arora, Emily Barker, Unmil P. Karadkar,
  Pratik Dave,
• Luis Francisco-Revilla, Richard Furuta,
• Frank Shipman, Suvendu Dash, Zubin Dalal
•  
• Center for the Study of Digital Libraries
• Texas AM University

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Waldens Paths Overview

• Facilitates inclusion of Web-based information to
  achieve teachers curricular goals
• Most information on the Web is not suitable for
  use in classroom education
• Information needs to be contextualized
• To suit the curricular goals
• To highlight focal points for students
• To present issues of interest
• Paths are annotated lists of Web pages

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Waldens Paths Overview
WWW Host
Web Page
Internet Backbone
A Path
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Waldens Paths Server

• Content frame

• Annotation frame
• Control frame

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Waldens Paths Server
Off-path traversal
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Early Waldens Paths Quizzes

• Annotations contained the questions
• Students turned in answers on paper

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Benefits of Online Testing

• Students
• Quicker turnaround time (improved feedback)
• Pointers to additional information
• Easily track personal progress
• Take multiple practice quizzes to fine-tune
  learning process
• Teachers
• Reduced grading burden via automation
• Easily generate slightly modified tests to
  discourage cheating
• Include additional information for student
  perusal
• Easily track overall and individual performance
• Improve teaching methods or materials

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Highlights of Teacher Survey

• Most teachers use the Web to disseminate course
  information
• Some teachers use online testing extensively
• Others do not use it at all
• Lack of support for expressive answers
• Drawing graphs
• Deriving equations
• Writing complex mathematical formulae

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Quiz Engine Design Principles

• Simplicity for wider use
• By teachers with little technological experience
• With little or no training
• Loosely tied to the Waldens Paths Server
• Quizzes in conjunction with paths
• Stand-alone quizzes
• Quizzes in conjunction with other software
• Promote variety of use
• Created by teachers or students
• Quizzes for academic evaluation or practice

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Quiz Engine Features

• Interactive and Passive Quizzes
• Immediate evaluation and feedback during
  preparation
• Delayed evaluation for academic assessment
• Separation of question authoring and quiz
  creation
• Teachers may author questions at their
  convenience
• Creation of question banks for future use
• Quizzes generated based on the questions
  available at the time
• Students may generate practice quizzes (in
  progress)
• Centralized question bank
• Community benefit use of questions by other
  teachers
• Historical benefit use of questions from
  earlier semesters

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Quiz Engine Features

• Support for different types of questions
• Multiple choice with single correct answer
  (includes true-or-false)
• Multiple choice with multiple correct answers
• Specific word or phrase as the correct answer
• Long essay-type answer (graded by the instructor)
• Supplementary information
• URL for a Web page with more information
• Image as an intrinsic part of the question or as
  a clue
• Quizzes with varying properties
• Randomize questions
• Include questions authored by others

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Quiz Engine Authoring Questions
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Quiz Engine Creating a quiz
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Quiz Engine Interactive quiz
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Quiz Engine Passive quiz
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Current Directions

• Integrate the Quiz Engine into the Path Server
• Enable students to track their own progress
• Student initiated quizzes Take Quiz Now icon
• Path Server will track path reading sessions
• Support complex relations between browsing and
  quizzes
• Explore changes to nature of paths
• Embedded quiz pages
• Mandatory or optional
• Announced or surprise (pop quizzes)
• Engage students in the learning process
• Support co-authoring of paths and quizzes
• Widen the variety of supported question types

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Resources

• Waldens Paths Homepage
• http//www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/
• Principal Investigators
• Richard Furuta (furuta_at_csdl.tamu.edu)
• Frank Shipman (shipman_at_csdl.tamu.edu)
• Waldens Paths Test Server
• http//walden.cs.tamu.edu/