To add your own custom and book-specific fill-in-the-blank questions to your students' quizzes, or to select questions written by other teachers, click the drop-down in the top right of your account and select Question Search.
Search for the book you'd like to add questions for:
Type in a statement about the book, using four underscores to represent a blank in the sentence:
Then type in a possible answer and hit enter. Add additional answers like other correct answers, and common synonyms or misspellings, hitting the comma or enter key to submit each possible answer:
Once your fill-in-the-blank question is read, click the green Save button to submit the question to your pool of fill-in-the-blank quiz questions for that book.
To select questions written by other teachers for a book, search for the book using the steps above, then click the Teacher Questions tab on the right:
Click the Add link next to the questions you would like to add to your account:
Each question you add will then display under your My Questions tab for that book, and will be available on your students' quizzes for that book.
How to write a good fill-in-the-blank question:
A fill-in-the-blank question should be a sentence containing a blank space where a student provides the missing word or words. This blank should be part of the sentence, rather than a response to the sentence. For example:
Yes:
Sally wanted to send a ____ to her best friend.
No:
What did Sally want to send to her best friend? ____
Your fill-in-the-blank questions will be scored automatically based on the possible answers you provide. Therefore, answers to a fill-in-the-blank question should be short, straight-forward, and specific, so that a student who read and understood the book will be able to predict and type in one of the possible answers. Ideally, the answer typed in by the student will be an exact match to a possible answer associated with the question, but our algorithms are smart enough to account for some spelling errors, synonyms, etc.
Here are some other examples:
Yes:
When Ethan looks under his bed, instead of his monster, he finds a [note,letter].
No:
[Clay] loved all the Dragonets.
In the first example, the character and setting are specific, and the answer includes two possible synonyms. In the second example, the question is too broad. Many people throughout this book could be said to love Dragonets, but Clay is the only listed correct answer. The fill-in-the-blank questions are designed to quickly test reading comprehension, not to trip up the student.