About our JavaScript Gap-Fill Question Generator
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Create a Question | On-line tests in economics
This Question Generator has been created by the Economics Subject Centre as a service to economists or other academics who want an interactive element in their on-line teaching material. Once you enter the question text and the answer, the generator produces a web page. You can save it as HTML, edit it with any HTML editor and then make it available on an internet or intranet. The student sees a box into which they type an answer and a comment box which tells them if it is correct.
This is not for assessment, but rather to make the readers of your online text pause and think. There are two kinds of questions it can generate: Verbal and Numerical.
Verbal Questions
In this case the answer is a word or short phrase. The match is case-insensitive and ignores preceding or tailing spaces or punctuation. Hence, if you have specified the answer as "Keynes", the following answers by the student will all be rated as correct:
There are optional additional answer boxes, so that you could have "Keynes", "J Keynes", "J M Keynes" and "J Maynard-Keynes" as acceptable answers for the same question.
Verbal questions might test knowledge of terminology, basic factual knowledge, or, if you're careful with making the answer unambiguous, more analytical skills, without the disadvantages of multiple-choice questions, where you have to think of plausible "distractors".
Numercial Questions
In this case, you enter a correct answer and a numerical accuracy figure. The student's answer is marked correct if it is within the specified range. For example, if the answer is 4000 but you will accept anything from 3990 to 4010, enter an accuracy figure of 10. Accuracy figures can be as large or small as you like.
Important note on combining questions
All the functionality required for the question is contained in the HTML document itself. You can even have multiple questions on a single page. However, there should only be one update function: this means that if you combine questions onto a single page, you should erase duplicate copies of that function. The HTML source code makes it clear how to do this.
Including graphics
To quickly produce graphics for use in these questions, you can use the following online tools:
- To produce graphs of an equation, e.g. y=x^2+2x+1, use the Tracés Animés on-line equation plotter.
- For graphs of any of a huge database of (mainly USA) economic time series, with many configurable options and transformations, use the Economagic GIF graph facility.
Of course, you can also use images created by your own image software.
