Question Types - The learning curve for question authors, from easiest to most complex
When learning how to write PrairieLearn questions, you typically start with simple, single variant multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and numerical style questions.
As you become comfortable with the system, you will want to learn more complex question types.
While the Prairielearn documentation does a good job of documenting these question types, it is less clear on these points:
- the best path to learning how to write these question types
- what each question type is good for
- what order to tackle them in
- pros/cons of each question type
List of Question Types
The table below shows our own dev teams journey with learning various question types.
This page presents the question types in the order that we suggest you learn them, i.e. from easiest to most difficult.
| Question Type | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Simple Multiple Choice (no randomization) | Good for getting started with PrairieLearn |
| Multiple Choice with randomization | Good for starting to explore randomization |
| Parsons Problems | Dragging and dropping blocks of code or text to construct a solution |
| External Grader | Useful for checking whether students can write code |
| Workspace | Useful when you want students to write code in an authentic coding environment (e.g. Jupyter Notebooks or VSCode ) |
The table of contents at the bottom will present all of the question types we have documented in alphabetical order.