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The text highlight task
The text highlight task

Authors can create text highlight tasks that let learners highlight words, sentences or paragraphs within text. 

Christine Nicholls avatar
Written by Christine Nicholls
Updated over a week ago

This article covers the text highlight task type.

For a general overview of tasks and what they can do, see An introduction to tasks and for general instructions on how to add them to your course, see How to add a task to your course.

Overview of the text highlight task

The text highlight task type lets your learners highlight words, sentences or paragraphs within a block of text. 

Example text highlight task which asks learners to identify (in a paragraph about the Earth) the features that affect the temperature of the earth. Sentences selected within the paragraph are highlighted in yellow.

When should I use the text highlight task?

Text highlight lends itself really well to supporting reading comprehension. But the purpose of that reading comprehension can change a fair bit. Let's take a look at a few examples.

Example 1: Spot the mis-advice

In the example below, learners are recalling what they know to spot any mistakes.

Example text highlight task which asks learners to identify the misadvice in a paragraph about cultural competence. Sentences selected within the paragraph are highlighted in yellow.

Example 2: Case study evidence

You could also step it up by using a mini case-study where you ask learners to spot what someone shouldn't do or why they did what they did. In the example below, we're asking learners to apply their knowledge of construction to find evidence for a character's decision. 

Example text highlight task which asks learners to identify the items in a description of damage to a home that would lead to someone recommending partial recladding. Sentences selected within the paragraph are highlighted in yellow.

Example 3: Compare and contrast

We could also get learners to compare and contrast by looking for similarities or differences as in the example below.

Example text highlight task which asks learners to identify the similarities between PR and advertising in a paragraph about these two activities. Sentences selected within the paragraph are highlighted in yellow.

So the next time you've got a whole lot of text on the page, consider using text highlight to make that reading a little more active.

How do I create a text highlight task?

All tasks load with an example task to give an idea of what each field is for. To add your own task details, you can type over the existing content in the fields or select Clear task content, to start completely fresh.

Clear task content button on right of task element below task type choice.

Standard fields

This task has the standard fields/options that all tasks have.

At the top:

  • Question: Where you set the main question/task which tells learners what to answer or do.

And at the bottom:

  • Hint: Add a hint to give pointers or clues to give learners extra guidance to complete the task. Learners can choose to See hint so it allows them to get this help “on demand”.

  • Feedback: Add feedback to give learners an automated response when they submit the task. See Writing feedback for tasks for pointers and ideas.

In between the top and bottom standard fields we have the following areas and fields.

How to edit the text and choose highlight settings

Under Edit text, you can add the text that learners will be highlighting.

Under Highlight settings you will see three options: Sentence, Paragraph and Word.

When you select for example, Word, every word in the text will become a highlightable item. You can switch from one type of highlight to another using Clear

The total number of highlighted items can be seen above the text. 

Screenshot showing the creation of a text highlight task which shows where you set the text to be highlighted (Edit text), whether learners can highlight sentences, paragraphs or words (Highlight settings) and set the correct answer (Correct).

How to set the correct answer(s)

Under Correct, select the correct highlighted items (in yellow as shown in image above).

If there are more correct answers, use the + to add alternative answers.

You can also choose to not set a correct answer. In which case, the task will not be automarked, and the task will be allocated the complete/incomplete with feedback marking template to allow facilitators to manually mark the task (if desired).

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