Fill in the Blank Prompts

How to use and configure the fill in the blank prompt and prompt options

Ryan Burke avatar
Written by Ryan Burke
Updated over a week ago

A Fill in the Blank prompt consists of a word, sentence, or passage with a blank space where a student provides the missing word or words.

Inserting Blanks

After adding your text, you can convert portions of the text to blanks by highlighting the desired word(s) and clicking Mark as Blank at the bottom of the prompt.

Inserting Hints

To leave a hint or inline note for students, highlight a passage and right click to open the inline menu options, then click Tooltip. You will then enter the hint or inline note and press enter to finalize. Students will be able to hover over the word(s) to reveal the hint.

Dropdown Fill in the Blanks

To make a fill in the blank a dropdown with multiple options, click on the blank to activate it, then click on the blank options in the toolbar.

Next, change "Type" to Dropdown and click the +Add Option button to add more options. Once all options have been added, click on the circle next to the correct answer and click Save.

Prompt Options

Making Fill in the Blank Draggable

To make your fill in the blank draggable, click on the prompt options icon and click on the Draggable toggle.

Below is how your students will see it.

Scoring

The prompt options also allow you to determine how the answers will be graded. By default, grading is case insensitive. Grading can be case sensitive, case insensitive, or by regular expression.

Grading student responses with regular expressions allows for flexibility with spelling, spacing, capitalization, and answer variations when auto-grading.

For a blank to have more than one possible correct answer, select the Regular Expression option for scoring and use a pipe ( | ) character (above the enter key with shift on your keyboard) between each correct answer option. For example, in Spanish there are two words for basketball. So, to allow both baloncesto and básquetbol to be correct, the input would be baloncesto|básquetbol (see below).

Manual Grading

To allow a student to enter a response that's manually graded such as their name, age, etc. you can click on the blank to activate it, and click on the blank options in the toolbar.

Then click on grading and change it from automatic to manual.

Once you click save, the autograder will ignore the prompt when grading and defer to the instructor.

Modifying When Live

A word of caution: Once students have started working on an activity, you should not add, remove, or change entries on a fill in the blank prompt since students' responses map to corresponding blanks by order of index.

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