The Sequencing question type can also be thought of as a ‘ranking’ or an ‘ordering’ question. I’ll cover the basics first and then I’ll tell you why ours is much better than any ranking questions you’ve seen before (or try it out right now).
Creating one couldn’t be easier – just enter the items in the correct order on the question properties page –
Here’s what the user will see – a ‘drag n’drop’ interface where the items are ranked by dragging them from the right to the slots on the left.
The big innovation is that partial credit can be awarded for partially correct answers. Take our sample question for example – the sizes of cities in Italy. Most students will know that Rome and Milan are the largest cities, but very few (if any) will know with certainty that Genoa has a larger population than Palermo. We can give most of the marks for knowing the basics, and extra credit for those fully in command of the details.
The scoring is based on ‘correct relative pairs’ – here’s how it works – firstly the sequence is broken down into relative pairs. In our example, there are 6 elements, which allows for 15 possible relative pairs. They are
Rome-Milan
Rome-Naples,
Rome-Turin,
Rome-Palermo,
Rome-Genoa,
Milan-Naples
Milan-Turin,
Milan-Palermo,
Milan-Genoa,
Naples-Turin,
Naples-Palermo,
Naples-Genoa,
Turin-Palermo,
Turin-Genoa,
Palermo-Genoa.
The scoring then subtracts the number of incorrect pairs from the number of correct pairs, it maps it to the number of points available for the question and rounds it to the nearest integer (or zero, no negative marks are awarded overall for a question). If you want to award a single point for each correct relative pair there’s a correct number of points based on the number of elements –
2 elements – 1 point
3 elements – 2 points
4 elements – 6 points
5 elements – 10 points
6 elements – 15 points
7 elements – 21 points
8 elements – 28 points
n elements – n * (n-1)/2