Sectioning Quizzes

[kfranco1031]

Hello,

I am the TTL at my school and I had a teacher ask me a question about how quizzes can be structured. She likes to use them to guide students through reading Spanish Literature. She was wondering if there is an option for her to display only a specific group of questions that pertain to one paragraph or page of the reading. Currently, there is only the option to either show all of the questions at once or one question at a time. It would be extremely useful for teachers to be able to separate questions into sections in order to help students focus on a particular area.

Thank you!

Katherine

[James · Accepted solution]

Katherine (@kfranco1031),

I'm not sure what Time-To-Live (TTL) has to do with this, but I'll try to answer it like it doesn't matter.

There are currently two quizzing engines within Canvas: Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes.

Canvas is pushing people towards New Quizzes and has announced the deprecation of Classic Quizzes. New Quizzes is still under development, though, so some people who have been using Classic Quizzes are putting off the switch until required.

Single Reading per Assignment

If you want to have a reading assignment that asks specific questions on just that assignment, then you will need to create a separate quiz. Neither Classic nor New quizzes allows you to have a quiz tied to different assignments where you show a subgroup of each quiz depending on the assignment.

Both allow you to have a quiz that can have the reading directions in them. That is, instead of having an assignment that has a quiz within it, you put the directions for the reading in the quiz itself. When handled this way, then you would make the quiz directions be the reading assignment and then make all of the questions be related to that reading assignment.

For classic quizzes, it doesn't matter whether you make it one question at a time or all at once as it shows the instructions on every question when done one question at a time (which really gets annoying  if your directions are long).

With either engine, you can still use a time limit on the quiz since students will see the instructions before they start taking the quiz.

Multiple Readings per Assignments

If you want a single quiz that refers to several passages and has students answer questions based off those, then it depends on which quizzing engine you're using.

With Classic Quizzes, which is what it sounds like you're describing, the trick I use is to make a Text-Only question that displays the instructions. For example you could have the text-only question say "Read pages 105–107 in your textbook and then answer these questions." Then you add questions under that. If you want to be able to randomize the order of the questions or have more questions than you want to ask, then put those into a question group. Make sure you display all questions at once.

With New Quizzes, there is a Stimulus question type. It allows you to put a stem "Read pages 105–107 in your textbook and then answer these questions." and then tell it which questions to ask. The stem is displayed on the left side with the questions on the right side of the screen.

With either approach, you can have multiple readings within a single quiz. You need to make sure there is not a time limit on them, though, as students won't get the reading assignment until they start the quiz.