#autograding

During the initial design phase of Tuva Activities and Lessons, one critical decision we made was that activities on Tuva would only initially support one item type – open-ended questions.

Why? We felt that activities and lessons based on authentic datasets gave both educators and learners a unique opportunity to look beyond the straightforward multiple-choice and True/False questions. 

With actual data and tools at our fingertips,  educators can pose a number of interesting, open-ended questions that gave learners an opportunity to:

Practice and gain exposure to the language of data, statistics, and graphing.

Construct arguments and support their reasoning with evidence from the data and their own visuals.

Explain their thinking in words, giving them an opportunity to focus on their grammar, sentence construction, as well as learn the techniques of quantitative reasoning.

Describe in words the various aspects of the data, including:

Any patterns or interesting phenomenon they discover.

Distribution of various attributes, such as its shape, its spread, or its center

                                        Image: New Item Type on Tuva

Over the last twelve months, we have received a variety of feedback from educators across math, science, statistics, and many other subject areas about being able to ask (and immediately grade) straightforward, multiple-choice questions at the beginning of the activity to assess for basic understanding, and then gradually build towards the more difficult, open-ended questions.

I am excited to announce that we will soon be adding these two new features - Multiple Choice Questions and Automatic Grading - to Tuva Activities and Lessons.

For Tuva Basic teachers, you will be able preview these new features via a number of different activities on the 25 Free Tuva Datasets.