Lisa Levinson, Linguistics | 2022-2023
This project aims to build tools and documentation for linguistics and similar fields where dynamic banks of qualitative questions might improve student learning outcomes by facilitating the creation of larger and rotating question sets. Especially for large courses, having a large set of possible assessment questions supports student learning by allowing for distributed practice. Dynamic questions which vary across assessments also foster equity by supporting the use of open-book, extended-time assessments out of the classroom setting, without providing unfair advantages to students with stronger social networks or capital and access to prior course materials. However, writing and deploying a large set of auto-gradable quiz and test questions is a significant challenge in fields where most questions are qualitative and cannot be made dynamic with random numeric seeds like quantitative problems. For this project we will be using the “exams” package (also known as r/exams, http://www.r-exams.org/) for the R programming language to build tools to create dynamic question sets for qualitative dynamic questions. We will aim to make import and export tools along with documentation that enable instructional team members which only basic knowledge of R to more easily create dynamic question sets that can be exported to various formats including Canvas, Problem Roulette, PDF, slides for iClicker, and Rmarkdown/Quarto-based websites. This work will be started in June 2022 in preparation for two Fall 2022 courses in the first phase of implementation.