Educational stacks

[Wilhelm Sanke]

Hello Glen,

You wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I was wondering if anyone has used Revolution in creating
>
> 1. A multiple choice quiz stack?
>
> (snip)



As an addendum to my previous post  three hours ago:

You can find Steve Messimers "Preceptor Tools", which very much rely on 
the "multiple-choice" principle, here :
<ftp://ftp.runrev.com/pub/revolution/downloads/third-party/preceptortools>.

There is also a stack "Multiple Choice Questionnaire" in folder "sample 
projects" of the Revolution distribution. This stack might be 
interesting as an example how specific questions of constructing 
multiple-choice exercises are addressed and programmed, otherwise it is 
very much sub-standard. At best it could serve as a starting point - 
maybe it is intended as such - for developing exercises that are nearer 
to state-of-the-art and state-of-the-discussion standards concerning 
"multiple choice".

As an educational format, multiple-choice is very much disputed and 
discouraged. Very often, multiple-choice exercises do not clearly 
distinguish in their objectives, e.g. are they intended for "teaching", 
"learning", or simply "testing"?

More modern teaching and testing procedures try to minimize the role of 
"multiple-choice". Even the American SAT, which very much relied on 
multiple-choice, is slowly steering away from this format as it adds 
more and more essay and open-ended parts where you actively have to 
produce responses and not only  to recall and choose from preselected 
answers. So does the FCAT, the "Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test", 
which is applied at various grade levels in Florida schools and the main 
threshold you have to pass to get your high-school diploma.

But designing multiple-choice exercises can be a nice programming 
enterprise; this is what I had in mind when I produced my 
multiple-choice tutorial. And, indeed, a carefully designed 
multiple-choice exercise can be useful as a *part* of more comprehensive 
teaching, learning, and testing strategies.

Best regards,

Wilhelm Sanke
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>