The Text Input question allows you to search a piece of text for a particular word or phrase. When that is a single word it is straightforward but when the answer s a combination of words or phrases, or there may be reasonable alternative answers it needs a little thought to ensure the question tests for what you want to test.
If you want to score a particular phrase then type the phrase in quotes and only the phrase as a whole will score the points. Remember though that if you put a phrase in quotes the whole phrase must be included and if you don’t any word could be scored.
Thus if you wanted to check that a student can name a part of a cell as the cell membrane you might be tempted to put the answer as "cell membrane" and there are going to be circumstances where it is important to get the proper phrase. In this case let’s assume we will allow just membrane but remember that if you type cell membrane without the quotes, the student could score for cell instead which might not be what’s required. Thus you would need to type in membrane OR "cell membrane"
You can check the text answer for a combination of words and phraseschecks using common search keywords such as AND, OR and NOT.
The OR option is useful for taking acceptable spelling mistakes into account. For example you may set one example to look for particularORparticulr. It is also useful for allowing variations on the possible answer. For example consider the search term for an answer about plant nutrition being absorbed by the roots. The root absorbs minerals and water from the soil to pass on to the rest of the plant. The correct answer is water AND minerals but we might think the latter could also be legitimately called nutrients or even chemicals. We might also want to ensure that we allow for the fact the student might only come up with water or only nutrients.
Opus reads the operators from left to right so you need to be careful how these are phrased. We might type the following as the search term
minerals OR nutrients AND water
This makes sense to us as we know nutrients might be an alternative for minerals. But the computer doesn’t infer connections from meaning.
The input above will score as correct if the answer includes minerals or if it includes nutrientsand water but it will not score for nutrients alone. Which is not what we want.
However, we could type
water AND minerals or nutrients
This will score water first and then score either minerals or nutrients, which is what we want.
An alternative would be to split the answer above across two answers. This gives us the advantage of being able to
give different scores for different parts of an answer
give bonus points for fuller answers
ensure all elements of an answer are included.
In one answer we check for water in one answer and give it only 1 point as it is the easier answer and then score minerals OR nutrients in another and give this 2 points.
Note:
In this case a full answer will score a total of 3 points. If you simply want to score each element equally then minerals OR nutrients would just score 1 in addition.
If you only want to score 1 point for a complete answer of water with either minerals or nutrients then simply set the score for each at 0.5 (half a mark).
When we want to check the student’s input against more than one answer in this way then we attach the Text Input Properties to <Any Answer>.
Note:
The Any Answer option is designed to be used alone. You cannot have more than one input in a Question which uses Any Answer. If you are creating a cloze procedure with several text input boxes and one of them uses Any Answer then you need to create the Any Answer input as a separate Question (you can have more than one question object on a page and it does not need to include anything other than the text input box).
It is also worth remembering that if you use Any Answer then you must not include part of a phrase in one answer and duplicate it in another
For example the answer to another biology question might be root hair cell. We might want to award a point for root but a bonus point for root hair cell.
We might be tempted to put root in one answer with a score of 1 point and then root hair cell in another with a score of 2 points. Again the computer will take us literally and score for both root and for root hari cell so the student would score 3 points.
Equally even if we have one answer which has root as the answer and another as root hair cell with each scoring one point, the student answer with just root will still score twice because root is in both answers. We need root in the first and "root hair cell" in the second or even just "hair cell" which would allow both root and "hair cell" to score one point but the full answer of root hair cell would score the full two marks.