Student feedback

With WIRIS quizzes, you can insert mathematical content in the wording of the question and perform some verifications on the answer, as well as inserting mathematical content in the feedback provided to the student. 

In the following example, we will simply return a text string, but this string will be sensitive to the answer given by the student. The question posed is a Multiple choice, and the student will be requested to report the degree of a random polynomial. The possible answers will be the degree, the coefficient of the highest degree term and the constant term. System answer will depend on the student's answer.

This is the appearance of the question posed to the student and the feedback presented when s/he inserts a wrong answer:

If you wish to obtain this behaviour from WIRIS quizzes, start as usual by creating the appropriate type of question, in this case Multiple choice, and inserting the name and the wording of the question. p variable will contain the random polynomial that we will define here following.

In order to act on the student's answers, we must foresee them; so we will insert in the system all the options as we would do in a common Multiple choice exercise. g variable will contain the polynomial degree, i. e., the correct answer.

In the other possible answers, we simply link the false option presented in this exercise with the feedback desired, that is, the sentence "You chose the coefficient of the highest degree term of the polynomial." Please note that the editor offers WIRIS editor and WIRIS cas icons and, thus, as we inserted plain text, we can also insert the values or graphics wished. In this case, we are not doing so in order to avoid complexity, but you can check the Algorithm field and Graphic content for more information.

Given that all text fields are treated uniformly by WIRIS quizzes, inserting any value or graph in the feedback is similar to inserting it in the wording.

With the aim of presenting the complete solution of the exercise, we will show a possible feedback for the third answer (also false, consequently).

And, finally, a possible way of defining a random polynomial. Since compact writing took priority at the expense of readability of the proposal, we will describe it in detail to make it more understandable:

• The first line defines an f function that generates, at each call, a monomial with random coefficient between -10 and 10, with random degree as well, oscillating between 0 (constant term) and 5.
• The second line defines g as the degree of the p polynomial, still undefined, but that we will define shortly.
• The third line defines c as the coefficient of the highest degree term of the future p polynomial.
• The fourth line defines i as the constant term of the p polynomial. Please note that defining these elements in advance is required because we will use them in the interruption condition of the repeat-until command displayed here following.
• Lines 5 to 7 form the mentioned repeat-until command, that will define the p polynomial as the sum of five monomials using the f function, and it will verify afterwards whether degree, coefficient of highest degree term and linear term of the polynomial are different from each other, since we will provide them as options for the student and no repetition is desired. If there was a repetition, the repeat section will run again, generating another p polynomial, and so on indefinitely until we find a polynomial that matches all conditions required.

Out of the yellow box, that is, out of the library, we can see a random example of the run of our program, with the corresponding values of c (highest degree coefficient), g (degree) and i (constant term).