Categorising student responses for feedback based on multiple choice and text responses

Being able to provide fast and useful feedback to students is an essential part of the learning process. Multiple-choice questionnaires are tool often used, due to the ease of marking, and therefore rapid feedback to students. Since these however lack detail and confidence when checking understanding, an added textual component can help to verify students’ understanding. In this paper we discuss a methodology for evaluating and categorizing students multiple-choice and text justification. This is applied to three examples of students comments and shows the usefulness of the added textual field.