Martin,
The marvels of modern technology. Yes indeed you could and
maybe can do this marvellous playing with stems and keeping
data on each compbination. Effectively this means you are
almost storing all the combinations as if they were
different questions - which is what TAL does. There is an
interesting difference in conception between you proposal
which potentially offers the world a single standard
normalised question set. The approach on TAL is to say that
each course will want to use the same question in a
different context and so they will want to have different
metrics (Time-to-do and facility) for each question.
Clearly if you have been drilling students on how to
perform a particular type of question they would find it
easier and quicker to do the question than if you expect
them to work out how to do the question from first
principles.
Jon Sims Williams
On Thu, 22 Mar 2001 18:53:37 -0000 Martin Schranz
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Dear Martin and David,
> >
> > Thank you for clarifying the issue for me. Yes you can
> > generate all these marvellous number of questions from a
> > set of possible answers. The problem will be that all the
> > generated questions will have different difficulties. This
> > does not matter if you are just providing students with
> > practice but if you want to use the results for formal
> > assessment then getting questions of random difficulty is a
> > problem.
>
> Jon Sims Williams
>
> there is an easy solution to the problem varying difficulty ,
>
> the 'master' table that controls the interactions between the different
> 'statements' also contains a field that describes the difficulty of this
> 'relationship',
> the 'difficulty' of the question is not predetermined by anyone but is
> actually created on the fly from a continous calculation based on
> 1. the rate of attempts at this question
> 2. the rate of correct answers to this question
> 3. the rating of each individual attempting this question (how good or bad
> the student is)
>
> each attempt at a question is logged, including the time, location and
> profile of the individual student,
> in addition there is a table totally dedicated to recording the history of
> each student, this table can be accessed by both the student and the tutor
> allowing for personalised tuition that need not be synchronised in time and
> place,
>
>
> in this way the database provides a 'real' factual calculation of the
> difficulty of each question which is not tainted by tutor bias,
>
> regards
----------------------
Jon Sims Williams
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