The Connexions project provides the ability to do simple response processing through stylesheets and JavaScript. Examples of QML items thus processed are available in the QML 1.0 examples module.

PLEASE NOTE: This response processing is intended for the student to do self-testing as he or she moves through modules. Any student with minor technological know-how can determine the answers to the questions by viewing the source file. Hence, if you do not want students to have easy access to the answers to the questions, do not include them in the QML - leave the key blank and do not put information in the feedback tags that will allow the student to determine the correct answer.

Please also note that while the current Connexions response processing can determine whether answers to single-response, multiple-response, and single-response questions are correct, it does not process the responses to text-response questions (this requires high-level and very situation-specific software that we do not have plans to provide at this time). Instead, it only shows the general feedback.

In QML, items (test and homework questions) are either grouped together in a problemset or are written individually. Each item contains the question being asked of the user, the response options together with answer-specific feedback, if any, general feedback, if any, and a key. The items can also contain hints and links to resources.

The first thing you need to do is decide whether your items should be grouped together in a problemset or not. If you are writing QML with CNXML, you can only use items, and each item will go within a CNXML exercise tag. If you have a reason to logically group your items together (e.g. they comprise a homework set) and you are not writing for CNXML, enclose them in a problemset. To write a problemset, all you need to do is enclose your individual items within a problemset tag. If you are writing individual items and do not have a good reason to group them together within problemsets, or you are using CNXML, write items without enclosing them within a problemset tag.

The problemset tag encloses one or more items, and has one optional attribute called id. If you will be making a number of problemsets and need to be able to reference them individually, you will want to add a unique id attribute to each of your problemsets to distinguish between them.

	      
      <problemset id="homework1">

        <item . . .>
        </item>

      </problemset>

      

The next tag is the item tag, which contains the question, response options, and so forth. Each item tag must contain an id attribute and a type attribute. Ideally, the id attribute should be unique; no two items you write should have the same attribute. How you do this is up to you.

The type attribute determines the type of question you are asking. It must be one of the following:

Finally, it is important to note that an item must contain one question tag. It may also contain zero or more answer tags, and zero or one key tags. However, the existence or non-existence, as well as the contents of these last two tags, may be slightly different depending on the type of question. Items may also contain one or more resource tags and hint tags, and one general feedback tag.

	 
	An example for a single-response question:

      <item id="item1" type="single-response">
	
        <question>
	  Are bananas a fruit or a vegetable?
        </question>
	
        <resource uri="http://bananas.com/bananas.csv" />
	
        <answer id="fruit">
	  .
          .
	</answer>

        <answer id="vegetable">
	  .
	  .
        </answer>

        <hint>Bananas grow on trees.</hint>

	<feedback>Bananas are a fruit.</feedback>

        <key answer="fruit" />
	
      </item>
      

The question tag contains the question you are asking of the user. It can be written in plain text, or using markup from another language (such as HTML, which allows you to include pictures and graphs as well as text). Be aware that the stylesheets for the Connexions project currently only allow plain text and CNXML (with and without MathML) within question tags. If you use CNXML (with or without MathML) within a QML tag, the first tag must be a section tag, which may contain any of the tags a CNXML section tag is allowed to contain.

	 
      <question>
	Are bananas a fruit or a vegetable?
      </question>
	
      

The resource tag allows you to provide a URI attribute (file location, web address, etc.) for a particular item. For example, if you had the necessary software, you could use the resource tag to attach a reference to a dataset and generate question and answer values from that dataset. At the present time, Connexions has no software to do this, and the resource tag is ignored by our stylesheets.

It also has an optional id attribute. If you are using more than one resource for a particular item and need to keep track of which resource is which, you will want to include an id tag.

The resource tag is an empty tag, which means you must include a slash at the end of the tag.

	 
      <resource uri="http://cnx.rice.edu/datasets/dataset1.csv" id="resource1" />
      
      

How you construct the answer tag, including whether you include an answer tag at all, depends on your item-type. However, in all cases where you have an answer tag, the ID of the answer tag must not contain any commas, as the key tag refers to the answer IDs separated by commas.

	   
	<item id="item1" type="single-response">
	  
          <question>
	    Are bananas a fruit or a vegetable?
          </question>
	
          <resource uri="http://bananas.com/banana_dataset1.csv" />
	
          <answer id="fruit">
	    <response>A fruit.</response>
  	    <feedback>Correct!</feedback>
	  </answer>

          <answer id="vegetable">
	    <response>A vegetable.</response>
	    <feedback>Incorrect.</feedback>
          </answer>

          <hint>Bananas grow on trees.</hint>
	   
          <feedback>Bananas are a fruit.</feedback>

          <key answer="fruit" />
	
      </item>
	
      

	   
	<item id="item1" type="text-response">
	  
          <question>
	    Are bananas a fruit or a vegetable?
          </question>
	
          <resource uri="http://bananas.com/bananas2.csv" />
	
          <answer id="fruit">
  	    <feedback correct="yes">Correct!</feedback>
	    <feedback correct="no">Incorrect.</feedback>
	  </answer>

          <hint>Bananas grow on trees.</hint>

          <feedback>Bananas are a fruit.</feedback>

          <key answer="fruit" />
	
        </item>
	
      

The hint tags each contain a hint to be displayed to the user upon request. The content of the hint tags is text or markup. Be aware that the stylesheets for the Connexions project currently only allow plain text and CNXML (with or without MathML) within response tags. If you use CNXML (with or without MathML) within a QML tag, the first tag must be a section tag, which may contain any of the tags a CNXML section tag is allowed to contain. The hint tag has no attributes; it is assumed that if there are multiple hints, they will be displayed to the user in order.

	
        <hint>Bananas grow on trees.</hint>
	
      

The key tag contains the answer key, for items for which the answer key is included.

The key tag varies slightly depending on the type of item. For single-response items, the key tag contains an "answer" attribute which refers to the id tag of the correct answer.

	
      <key answer="fruit" />
	
      

	
      <key answer="fruit,yellow" />
	
      

	
      <key answer="uno,dos,tres,cuatro,cinco" />
	
      

	
      <key>One example of a correct answer is "No hay nadie
      aqui."</key>

      <key>3.14159</key>