Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)

[Marian Petrides]

One thing I make extensive use of is check boxes.  This allows you to 
ask relatively open-ended fact questions.  For example, present a 
clinical vignette and ask  "out of this list of 9 diagnoses which could 
cause this clinical picture (ie what is your differential diagnosis at 
this point)"; student needs to get all correct diagnoses and no 
incorrect diagnoses.

If you are programming the parser yourself, you can even set up 
"permissive" rules. Using the above example, say 4 of the responses are 
the ones sought after, but there are 2 others that might be viewed as 
correct in certain circumstances.  You could then allow all of the 
following to proceed to the card for "correct answer":  correct 4, 
(correct 4 + one other), (correct 4 +  the other possibly correct), 
(correct 4 + both others). The answer card then tells the student what 
the sought after answer was and why, then explains the "permissive" 
answers.

The other thing which can be done is to simulate real-world tasks.  
I've put together a module that simulates the way a bench tech goes 
about interpreting an antibody identification panel. The programming 
for this was actually quite easy.  What was difficult was figuring out 
the graphical display--once I created the graphics for a hardcopy book 
I wrote, the programming solution made itself apparent.

For those who are curious, I'll describe what I did (ignore if you 
like).   If you envision a grid consisting of 10 rows and 25 columns, 
the first step the student needs to do is to highlight the correct rows 
(on-off toggle using unhighlighted graphic vs highlighted one (both 
created in Photoshop). Then the student needs to toggle one of the 
following 3 (no image, slash, or X) at the top of each column.  
Eventually, the parser needs to see whether the correct rows are 
highlighted and whether the correct mark appears at the top of each 
column. Again, there are "permissive" rules covering circumstances in 
which both a slash or an X could be correct.

M

On Aug 11, 2004, at 12:53 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for 
> computer-based learning?