Question behaviours

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How questions behave


Deferred feedback
Adaptive mode and Adaptive mode (no penalties)
Allows students to have multiple attempts at the question before moving on to the next question. This behaviour requires that the "Whether correct" box is ticked under "During the attempt" in the "Review options" section, at a minimum.
Manual grading
Interactive mode
After submitting one answer, and reading the feedback, the student has to click a 'Try again' button before they can try a new response. They can be given hints to help them. Once the student has got the question right, they can no longer change their response. Once the student has got the question wrong too many times, they are just graded wrong (or partially correct) and get shown the feedback and can no longer change their answer. There can be different feedback after each try the student makes. The number of tries the student gets is the number of hints in the question definition plus one.
Immediate feedback
Conditional questions
The question editing page will display padlock icons to the right of each question.

Certainty-based marking


For detailed information on how CBM works and how students can benefit from it, see Using certainty-based marking.

correct answer; very sure
correct answer; fairly sure
correct answer; not very sure
wrong answer; very sure
wrong answer; not very sure

Managing question behaviours

An administrator can manage question behaviours available across the site in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Question behaviours > Manage question behaviours.

Deferred feedback with explanation

Deferred feedback with explanation is an additional question behaviour, available for Moodle 2.6+, that is just like deferred feedback, but with an additional input box where students can give a reason why they gave the answer they did. No attempt is made to automatically grade the explanation, nor is it required.

  • It may be used in various ways, for example:
    • The teacher may want to manually edit the grades where the student gave a wrong answer, to give partial credit if the student used the right method or approach.
    • The student might want to explain their thinking, so that later, when the results and feedback are revealed, they are reminded of what they were thinking at the time, and so can reflect more deeply.
  • You can use Language customization to change the default text string "Explain your reasons" in the file qbehaviour_deferredfeedbackexplain.php to a more specific text such as "Enter justifications below if you want partial credit in numerical problems by showing your steps, ignore otherwise." as described in

See also