Idea for Zesje 'answer sheet' to solve lack of space problems for students
Recently I have been thinking about Zesje after talking to some students about what they did and did not like about it. One of the main things that came out of this is that students feel restricted by the box where you have to fill in your answer. The reason for this is that most students do not directly know the answer to a question and need write some thoughts up while making an exercise. This results in using more space than is available in the square. The only solution for this is for students to use blank sheets of paper to make rough versions and transfer their answer to the Zesje answer sheet. However, this costs a lot of unnecessary time and leads to frustrations about the program.
The problem is that Zesje needs the box to determine which question is scanned. At least, that is what I can think of as the only real problem.
So I have been thinking on how to solve this and as far as I can see the answer sheet has to meet the following three requirements:
- Students should not be restricted to a square
- All questions need to be identified independently after scanning so they can be graded
- When needing extra paper, both of the different answer sheets should be connected to the same student.
So the idea I had is this: You make an answer sheet with two columns and 4 + 1 ‘rows’. 1 row is the top row of the answer sheet containing the QR code of the answer sheet which is the same on the first packet of answer sheets the students get. On the first page of this packet a student also needs to fill in his name, the subject and the student number. Just as usual to identify. The student number is filled in with squares, so it can be read by Zesje and can be coupled to the QR code. The rest of the rows are ‘answer rows’ where students can fill in their answer. These different ‘answer rows’ are separated by a somewhat thicker line. The answer rows itself are divided in two columns
- The first column contains squares you can fill in to indicate which question it is i.e. 1a or 6c, a box you can check saying ‘ignore this section’ (for when a student would strikethrough their answer otherwise) and an order box. The order box would come to use when students use more than 1 ‘answer section’ for a question. So you then get 1a (1), 1a (2) 1a (3) in the accurate order.
- The second column would contain the space for your answers.
In this way the student can use a second, third or more 'answer section' for his/her answer, depending on how much space he needs, while still identifying the different questions clearly.
When students need extra sheets of paper they would be given a form at which they have to fill in their student number again, so that it can be matched with the other sheets.
I know that it sounds a bit complicated when writing it down like this, so I’ve added a little drawing so you can see what I mean: Answersheet_drawing.pdf
Other advantages I see of using such a system of answer sheets:
- Every single answer sheet has the same format, for every different subject and a teacher can go back to using a single sheet of paper with the questions
- Sections crossed of by the student can be ignored, leaving a less messy answer.
- The size of the box does not indicate the length of the answer anymore.
Curious to hear what you think of the idea