Presenter – Marshall McArthur 麥查理
Chinese Studies Program
University of Houston
After the presentation if you have questions or suggestions, please contact me at:
chalimai@gmail.com You are welcome to write in Chinese (simplified or traditional) or my favorite English.
You can also provide feedback in the “Feedback” quiz listed in the toolbar “feedback” link:
This presentation highlights the use of question pools, also known as question banks. Originally I wanted to include question types, but given time limits, mention of question types is only included in the appendix, found in the toolbar link (CLTA-TEXAS Demo).
This presentation is not based on academic research, but on practical experience of designing question pools for elementary students of Chinese. Therefore it’s probably all wrong!
What is a question pool?
A question pool is easily illustrated with addition tables using numbers 1-9.
| 1 | 1 + 1 = 2 |
| 2 | 1 + 2 =3 |
| etc. | and so on … through 1 + 9 |
| up to 9 | and through 9 +9 |
If you design a practice quiz that includes one equation from each pool, you will have a practice quiz with 9 total questions. The point of the pool is so that each time a student retakes the practice, they will have a unique practice (quiz). You can find a sample addition quiz in the “quizzes” link (see toolbar menu).
Question pools are quite useful for automatically scored vocabulary quizzes and for character recognition quizzes. I typically use these “quizzes” for practice, not grades.
Character Recognition Quizzes
Let’s look at a character recognition quiz. Consider the vocabulary list which roughly correlates to the Chinese characters introduced in chapters 1-3 of the second edition of Integrated Chinese, a total of 114 characters.
One 北 不 大 贵 国 好 叫 姐 京 老 李 吗 么 美 名 呢 你 纽 朋 请 人 什 生 师 是 王 问 我 先 小 姓 学 也 友 约 中 字
Two 爱 爸 白 的 弟 都 儿 高 哥 个 孩 和 几 家 口 两 律 妈 没 妹 那 男女 片 谁 他 她 文 医 英 有 照 这 子 作 做
Three 半 菜 吃 点 多 饭 还 号 很 欢 见 今 可 刻 了 忙 门 明 年 期 认 日 上 识 事 岁 太 天 同 晚 为 喜 现 谢 星 样 因 月再 在 怎
For each chapter, you could design a practice quiz to randomly check students’ ability to type the correct Pinyin (i.e., recognize). Instruct students to retake the quiz until they can get 80% correct. So each chapter has it’s own quiz. Then at the end of each chapter you can design a cumulative quiz that checks students’ retention of previous chapters.
Below is a sample quiz of three total questions, or one question for each pool. This quiz is for a demo here. For an actual quiz you would want to include more questions. For your answer type Pinyin with a number for the tone. So answers would be:
问 = wen4 哥 = ge1, 今 = jin1 etc.
The quiz may be taken multiple times, and after completing the quiz students will see immediate feedback. Please try it. You will need to enter your name. Please enter your name in English.
When you submit your quiz you should get a certificate; if you like the certificate click the download button for the certificate. If you enter your name in Chinese, you will still get a certificate, but your Chinese name will not show up. Stupid computers!
https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/ugc/story.php?title=clta-texas-demo-characters-new
The quiz you just took is a cumulative quiz. So, selected questions from each chapter. A positive point of cumulative quizzes is that you may add to each previous quiz over a semester or more, to ensure that students consistently review characters they have “learned.” For example, cumulative quizzes could be:
Chapter 1
Chapters 1,2
Chapters 1-3
Etc.
Chapters 1-10.
Other types of quizzes:
Automatically scored character/vocabulary quizzes are an obvious quiz type for beginning and intermediate level classes. However, content with open-ended responses must be manually evaluated. For example, you could make pools of questions by level to give quick proficiency ratings.
Novice
What is your name?
How old are you?
What foods do you like?
Intermediate
How do you get to school?
What do you wear when it rains?
What do you do on weekends?
Advanced
What do somebody’s shoes say about their personality?
How do chopsticks signify culture?
Is a glass half full also half empty?
Each category has three questions each, so you could design a quiz that pulls one question of each level. This type of quiz seems to be a placement quiz, but could also be designed for a quiz about commonly taught topics, such as weather, routine, directions, likes and dislikes, etc.
Automatically scored dictation
Before looking at the explanation try a dictation quiz of one question, from a pool of six questions. For these questions it is important that you type the sentence in pinyin with no tones, no punctuation, and the proper spacing. I train students to type no-tone Pinyin in advance by giving them lists. Here is your quick cheat list of the “answers.” We will talk about tones vs. no tones after you take the quiz. When you type your answer, take care to type exactly as below, and remember to not type punctuation:
| Nimen jia you ji kou ren | 妳們家有幾口人 |
| Ni jinnian duo da | 你今年多大 |
| Xiangjiao duoshao qian yi jin | 香蕉多少錢一斤 |
| Jintian tianqi hen leng | 今天天氣很冷 |
| Ni zu mei zu fangzi | 你組沒組房子 |
| Wo hui shuo yi dian Hanyu or Wo hui shuo yi dianr Hanyu | 我會說一點韓語 |
To see a longer version of this chart with more explanation, please see here:
Here is the quiz, this time you will not be asked your name or email.
https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/ugc/story.php?title=clta-texas-demo-dictation-backupxz
Explanation
If you use dictation in your classes, most quizzes must be manually scored. While a lot of teachers have become “super-speed graders,” wouldn’t it be nice if you could give automatically scored dictation quizzes by saying “click this link?” It is possible, although from my experience setting up this type of quiz can be a headache, since most quiz makers and content managers (Blackboard, Canvas etc.) have not incorporated this feature into their design.
Basically, to make this type of question for a quiz you have a linked or uploaded audio file, and then a “fill in the blank” question. However, instead of just using a short blank, you would use a sentence such as: “The quick red fox leaped out of the woods, which startled me!”
For this type of question, you would type that sentence into the answer box, and the machine could automatically grade the “correct” response, right?
However, if that is the intended answer, the quiz manager will also look for proper spelling and punctuation. So the two answers below would be 99% correct, but considered 100% incorrect by the stupid machine:
Hte quick red fox leaped out of the woods, which startled me! (incorrect because of “hte.”
The quick red fox leapt out of the woods, which startled me! (incorrect because of extra space after “The.”
The quick red fox leaped out of the woods, which startled me. (Incorrect because of period instead of exclamation point).
A user-friendly design for this type question would be a simple check box that tells the machine to “ignore spaces and punctuation.” Even better would be a quiz-making design that used an algorithm to calculate the expected sequence of letters. Such an algorithm would take into account “hte” instead of “the.”
Those examples are for English. What happens if you ask students to type Pinyin with tones. First of all, typing standard tone marks (mā, má, mǎ, mà, ma 輕聲) for a short sentence is not practical. So you can ask students to type numbers for tones, or (in my opinion) ask them to omit tones.
Consider this ridiculous sentence:
在美國的啟蒙老師不教, 因此麥老師初次在臺灣坐做計程車時, 聽不懂司機罵的三字經.
Zài Měiguó de qǐméng lǎoshī bù jiāo, yīncǐ Mài Lǎoshī chūcì zài Táiwān zuò jìchéngchē shí, tīng bù dǒng sījī mà de sānzìjīng.
Can be typed with no punctuation and no tones:
Zai Meiguo de qimeng laoshi bu jiao yinci Mai Laoshi chuci zai Taiwan zuo jichengche shi ting bu dong siji ma de sanjijing
Try the quiz here:
https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/ugc/story.php?title=cltademosanzijing
That’s all the time we so we can have a Q/A. For some details about design, please see the appendix. Finally, if you would like to ask more questions after our time is up, or just give feedback, please email me at chalimai@gmail.com, or you can take the “feedback” quiz linked in the main header. Thanks for not falling asleep, and if you did thanks for not snoring!
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