If you want to check the text input by a student for a range of answers then you can assign the text input box to Any Answer via the drop down list in the Text Input Properties.
This is particularly useful for checking that long answers include a range of key words and phrases.
Note:
Like the other text answer options, the Any Answer option will only appear in the drop down if the text input box is in a question object.
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 more 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 or it may get scored twice.
To score long answers successfully you need to pick words and phrases which are crucial to the understanding of the answer. They need to be specific enough to avoid being included inadvertently but not so specific that a student fails to score simply because they have phrased something in a different way.
For example we might want to check a student has understood that a plant root hair cell absorbs water and minerals from the surrounding soil.
Checking for the phrase "absorbs minerals and water from the soil" is obviously too prescriptive. The student might phrase it in a slightly different way or answer something like "the plant gets water from the soil which also includes nutrients" which uses nutrients instead of minerals or gets instead of absorbs.
Using any answer we can create a series of individual checks with individual scores to get the best indication of understanding. Thus we might set the following answers and scores:
minerals OR nutrients 2 points
water 1 point
soil OR earth OR ground 1 point
absorbs 0.5 point (note we dont score gets because it is too easy to use in other contexts)
root 1 point
"hair cell" 1 point (note we dont want to simply score cell).
surrounding OR "around it" 0.5 point
Obviously exactly what phrases are key and what they should score will be up to individual developers.