User:Fasten/TestWiki

The project was originally intended as a CSL project but seems to be too useful for the OLPC itself.

TestWiki

The TestWiki will allow to generate multiple-choice tests and other tests in a wiki and to annotate those tests publicly or privately using the wiki syntax.

Tags of the TestWiki syntax will be in their own sub-namespace "TestWiki"

{{TestWiki::Tag}}

Question types

Question types will include multiple-choice, grouping, table choice, ordering and comparison with expressions. A complex question will be able to combine several questions types (e.g. making a comparison the right answer in a multiple-choice test).

The software will be able to ask questions out of order and will keep track of successful answers to questions, showing successfully answered questions less often. The software will also be able to mix questions from several modules.

Questions will allow to specify a pool of right and wrong answers from which only a small subset is shown in each test question. The order of the questions will also be permuted randomly. (Answering the test isn't learned based on the structure and layout of the test).

Categories

TestWiki will allow to group tests into course modules with the module tag:

{{TestWiki::Module|<page>}}

The module tag marks content as part of a course module which is described on the wiki page {{page}}. Additionally test authors and users will be able to add their own non-standard categories independently. (Every user will have his own namespace of categories and will be able to ignore author categories.)

Tags

{{TestWiki::}}-tags will be invisible or appear as comments when a test page is displayed with the MediaWiki software.

{{TestWiki::Test|<name>}} is the beginning of a test.

Parameters:

difficulty - the difficulty parameter assigns a numerical difficulty between 0 and 0x7ffffff (usually 0 to 10).

option - the option parameter can specify an identifier (a short word) that can be used to add or remove the question from a test scenario (as an option).

{{TestWiki::Q}} is the beginning of a question.

{{TestWiki::A}} is the beginning of an answer to the previous question.

Test format

Tests will be formatted in XML in order to allow a well-defined and exchangeable database format for test databases.

Testing

Users can add their own comments in wiki format but during a test comments are only shown after a question has been answered. During a test conducted by a teacher the database of comments could be temporarily disabled or the pupils may be using a different computer.