Math Essay
Daniel Santamaria avatar
Written by Daniel Santamaria
Updated over a week ago

The Math Formula Essay question type allows students to input text and math formula within the same response, usually when a response needs further explanation. This question is teacher scored.

Figure 1: Math essay question example.

Create a question

Enter a question stem in the Compose Question area. Then select formatting tools you want to make available for the students. Go to Text formatting options and select tools from the drop down menus. You can add more buttons by clicking on the +Add button. To remove a button click on the trash can icon beside it. The students will be able to select tools from the panel below the line when entering text.

Figure 2: Selecting formatting tools.

You can then add special symbols the student may need to complete the task. In the Symbols section you can select a keyboard group from the drop down menus or add more by clicking on +Add, once for each new keyboard group. The student will be able to navigate between keyboards by clicking on the keyboard labels on the top right of the keyboard. See the tutorial on how to add various symbol groups available in Learnosity and create custom symbols.

Authors can also limit the number of lines of math or text that can be entered by the students. For this go to the Maximum lines field and add a number of lines.

The Default mode option determines which keyboard, text or math, will be enabled by default in the text entry area when the student sees the question.

More options

Additional formatting options can be found under More Options:

Template font scale: this will scale the font relative to the question's font size. The default value is 150%.

Show keypad hints: this will enable/disable hints, such as keyboard shortcuts and symbol group titles that are shown on the keyboard top left corner when hovering over a symbol group key.

Enable horizontal keypad - this changes the keypad layout to a rectangular, 2 row, keypad. Currently, only the number pad is available with this option.

The Text blocks section is where you can define a list of custom units (such as g, kg, cm, oz etc.) that will not be rendered as LaTeX.

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