Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet questions are useful for assessing students' ability to understand and use spreadsheets to analyze and report tabular data. Question authors create spreadsheet templates to be completed by students. Student responses are automatically scored and immediate feedback is optionally provided to the student.

Try it

Imagine a scenario where a home economics teacher wants to test your ability to create a personal budget. She creates a spreadsheet template with a list of expense categories and some fixed values and asks you to complete the budget using appropriate formulas.

Your task is to enter forumlas into the blank (red) cells of the table to compute the expected values described in column C (e.g. cell B3 should contain the forumla =B2*35% or =B2*.35).

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Note: The spreadsheet question type can be set to provide immediate feedback (as in this demo), delayed feedback through a "Check Answer" button, or no feedback for summative use cases.

How it works

The Artcompiler spreadsheet question type is purpose built for assessment. In addition to providing common spreadsheet user experience, it is designed to be tightly integrated with assessment platforms.

Key features of the spreadsheet question type include:

  • Scoring individual cells by equivalence of the formula, value, or formatted text
  • Common spreadsheet formula syntax and function names
  • Protecting cells and regions to make read-only parts of the question template
  • Styling and formatting cells and regions using standard spreadsheet functionality

Making spreadsheet assessments

Spreadsheet assessments have a complex design language. Whether that language is expressed through a graphical user interface or a task specific language, there is a lot for the question author to manage. For this reason we provide a hybrid (Make) tool that includes a property editor and an English language interface which automatically generates the code for the question. That code is the single source of truth that defines the question. The author can read (and write) that code to fully understand (and modify) the question being made.

Here is a screencast of creating a spreadsheet assessment with the Make tool and CSV data.

Using CSV Data to Create a Spreadsheet Question