WebRespond: User's Guide

WebRespond is a web based quizzing program which has the following functionality.
  1. Restricted student access through the use of passwords.
  2. Presentation of any combination of multiple choice, true false, short answer, and essay questions.
  3. Random ordering of options for a particular question.
  4. Automatic grading and reporting of student's responses via email.
  5. Immediate feedback to students about each question.
The degreee of functionality for a particular quiz is established by the instructor as they set up the questions and the master quiz file. At this point it is recommended that WebRespond be only used for reviewing material or for taking surveys. Even in future versions, when security features are established, the best security is actual supervision at an established location (i.e. a computer lab).

Although the operation of WebRespond is fairly straight forward from the user's point of view, the following documentation is provided to illustrate various features of WebRespond and to serve as a help guide.

Start-Up

When WebRespond is first called by a web page, it will load in a master question file and display a start-up screen. If the master question file specifies any student passwords, the following screen is presented

The student must enter both a login name and a password. If these two entries are not correctly entered by the student, access to the quiz will be denied. A total of 200 different password entries are allowed in this version of WebRespond. If no password entries are specified, then the two entry fields will be absent from the start-up screen and the student can begin the quiz by pressing BEGIN.

Question Display

Once past the login screen, the student will see the question display screen. The question display has two buttons which can be used to navigate the quiz. Next and Previous allow the student to sequentially move forward or backward through the quiz questions. There is also a choice box in the upper right corner so the student can go directly to a question. Done is used to stop the quiz. If this option is hit by accident, the student is allowed to return to the quiz through the final display screen. Clear allows the student to clear a previously selected answer without choosing a different answer. This feature is useful if the instructor penalizes for incorrect answers, but not for unanswered questions. A sample question is given below.

Notice that the question itself has buttons for selecting the appropriate answer. When an answer is selected, that choice shows up above the Clear button. In this particular example no answer has been chosen. Since the question was larger than the available space, a scroll bar is present to the right of the question. Make sure you scroll through all of the question before answering. This particular question also has D as an option. We can also observe from this display that the quiz is named "Sample Quiz #1" (upper left corner), we are on the fifth question (upper right corner), there are a total of 12 questions (lower right corner), and four questions have been answered (lower right corner). If any of the previous questions were skipped, the number would be less than four at this point.

Final Display

When the Done button is pressed you will see the following screen.

Notice that the student can return and answer more questions. If the student reviews the results and returns to this page, the Answer More button will no longer be visible. It is possible to specify that each question be only seen once. In this case the Previous button of the question panel is not present and the Answer More button on this panel is not present. The Review Results button can be eliminated from this page if the quiz is set to quiz mode rather than review mode.

If either of the last two buttons are pressed, WebRespond generates an email message summarizing the students performance for the entire quiz and for each individual question. This message is sent to a location specified by the quiz's author before the student has access to the review display.

Review Display

If the student selects the Review Results button, a report of each question is made available.

Notice that the review display gives the student score in the lower right corner. The actual question is repeated along with the student's response and the correct answer. The Previous and Next buttons can be used to look at the result of each question.