Question behaviours

How questions behave

The following question behaviors are available when creating a quiz (also when previewing questions):

Deferred feedback Users

must enter an answer to each question and then submit the entire quiz before anything is graded or they get any feedback.

Adaptive mode and Adaptive mode (no penalties)

Allows users to have multiple attempts at the question before moving on to the next question. This behavior requires that the “Whether correct” box is ticked under “During the attempt” in the “Review options” section, at a minimum.

Manual grading

Used for essay questions (irrespective of what the quiz is set to) but you can now choose to have every question in the quiz manually graded if you wish.

Interactive mode

After submitting one answer, and reading the feedback, the user has to click a ‘Try again’ button before they can try a new response. They can be given hints to help them. Once the user has got the question right, they can no longer change their response. Once the user has got the question wrong too many times, they are just graded wrong (or partially correct) and get shown the feedback and can no longer change their answer. There can be different feedback after each try the user makes. The number of tries the user gets is the number of hints in the question definition plus one.

Immediate feedback

Similar to the interactive mode in that the user can submit their response immediately during the quiz attempt, and get it graded. However, they can only submit one response, they cannot change it later.

Deferred feedback or Immediate feedback with Certainty-based marking (CBM)

With CBM, the user does not only answer the question, but they also indicate how sure they are they got the question right. The grading is adjusted by the choice of certainty so that users have to reflect honestly on their own level of knowledge in order to get the best mark.

Conditional questions

using the Interactive with multiple tries or Immediate Feedback behavior and with the navigation method set to ‘Free’, it is possible to make the display of a question dependent on a previous question being answered first.

The question editing page will display padlock icons to the right of each question.

Certainty-based marking

When a user answers a question they also have to state how sure they are of the answer: not very (less than 67%); fairly (more than 67%) or very (more than 80%). Their grading is then adjusted according to how certain they are, which means that for example if they answered correctly but were only guessing, their mark is adjusted from 1 to 0.33. If they answered wrongly but were very sure, their mark is adjusted from 0 to -2.

For detailed information on how CBM works and how users can benefit from it, see Using certainty-based marking.

correct answer; very sure

correct answer; fairly sure

correct answer; not very sure

wrong answer; very sure

wrong answer; not very sure

Managing question behaviors

An administrator can manage question behaviors available across the site in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Question behaviors> Manage question behaviors.

Deferred feedback with explanation

Deferred feedback with explanation is an additional question behavior available, that is just like deferred feedback, but with an additional input box where users can give a reason why they gave the answer they did. No attempt is made to automatically grade the explanation, nor is it required.

• It may be used in various ways, for example:
  • The instructor may want to manually edit the grades where the user gave a wrong answer, to give partial credit if the user used the right method or approach.
  • The user might want to explain their thinking, so that later when the results and feedback are revealed, they are reminded of what they were thinking at the time, and so can reflect more deeply.
• You can use Language customization to change the default text string “Explain your reasons” in the file qbehaviour_deferredfeedbackexplain.php to a more specific text such as “Enter justifications below if you want partial credit in numerical problems by showing your steps, ignore otherwise.”