Sections

Section page. This page is for editing information about a section and adding questions to it. It contains a couple of subpages.

Title: Title of the section
Display of the Pre Display Checks (with an edit and a remove link).
Add new Pre Display Check.
Add new Post Display Check. (See the sequencing documenation for this).
Use one or all conditions: boolean. Is it mandatory that all conditions have been met or is one condition enough (for not displaying this section)
Add question(s) from question database: Link to the search page which allows to search for questions that can be added to this section (multiple add possibility).
Add question: Link to the question catalogue entry form with a return_url that adds the question from the catalogue to this section and return to the section page.
Sort questions: Select (random, manual, alphabetic, numerical)
Number of questions: Number of questions that will be displayed in this section. Only useful if we randomize.
Custom Template: link. Opens a page with the current layout of the section in an textarea to be edited
At the buttom display all questions that have been added to this section with the following items
- Change order of questions (arrow navigation)
- Title of the question
- Link to edit question properties with regards to this section
  - Points: integer. Number of Points this question is worth in the section
  - Mandatory: boolean (yes/no). Is this question mandatory in this section. It will be displayed in any case, regardless of randomizing.
  - Fixed Position: select (1,2..., buttom). Position the question has to be displayed, regardless of randomizing.

The branch conditions page allows the conditions to be added under which this section will be called (branch conditions). You have two general options

Branch by question. This kind of branch depends on previous answers. A table of all multiple choice / boolean questions will be given to the creator along with their possible answers.
- Each question has a checkbox to determine if this question shall be included in this branch condition and a radio button, if all answers or just one have to be given (e.g. if we have multiple correct answers, we might want to branch into this section all answers have been selected by the respondee or just one).
- The answers have checkboxes, with the correct answers checked by default for multiple choice question. All other questions will only be displayed if they give a percentage value to the answer. In this case a textfield is given with the possibility to give a range (10-100) or seperate percentages (10, 100, 200).
- The display of this section depends on whether the valid answers have been given to all or just one of the questions that have been checked (as you might have guessed, we need a radio button for this below the table).
Questions that will be displayed depend on the position of the section. Only questions that could have been answered in the assessment before this section is displayed will be shown.
Branch by result. Instead of relying on one or multiple answers we check for a result in a previous section. This can only work in a test environment (so don't display this option if we are not dealing with a test).
- Section: select. This will display a list of all previous sections. The selected section will be used for the computation.
- Calculation: select (median, distractor, absolut number of points). What shall be computed to determine whether the user is allowed to see this section.
- From / To value: integer. Two fields to display the valid range for which this section will be displayed to the user.
It is imagineable that a combination of both methods makes sense, so we should take this into account when creating the UI.

Order of creation: sections and questions

Requiring the questions to be written first before the sections are created by selecting and "inserting" the questions into the section is reasonable. But it would also be very useful to be able to import entire sections from other assessments into a new assessment. In clinical trials, there are sets of questions that show up in many forms, and it shouldn't be necessary to recreate these sets every time a new assessment is being designed.

I think that the data model should provide catalogues of all levels of the hierarchical assessment structures to support, say, inserting one entire assessment into the middle of another. This seems like a generalization of the mechanism you suggest here.

-- Stan Kaufman on November 18, 2003 05:19 PM (view details)

Branch conditions

It seems to me that there are two types of branch conditions:

Single item branch points: a user's response evaluates against some criteria (is choice n; is < 50 or > 200; regexps to some string; etc) and this evaluation then directs the user down 1-m paths.
Multiple item branch points: a user's responses to 2-m items (located in 1-n sections) all evalute against some criteria to direct the user down 1-m paths: (if item a response is A and item b is B, then route C)

The datamodel and UI must thus support creating and processing a) these criteria; and b) the paths. This seems more or less to be what you've said, I think.

-- Stan Kaufman on November 18, 2003 05:32 PM (view details)