Kinds of Educational Assessment and Public-opinion Survey Items

Educational Exercises and Activities Community Group,


Hello. I am pleased to share that a new Civic Technology Community Group<https://www.w3.org/community/civics/> has recently started. I write today to share an interesting analogy that can be drawn between educational assessment items and public-opinion survey items. Some of the imaginative kinds of items that we might create for educational assessment can also be of use for kinds of public-opinion survey items.

Examples include:

  1.  Boolean items, true or false.
  2.  Upvote or downvote; thumbs up or thumbs down.
  3.  Multiple-choice items.
  4.  Textboxes with incremental search from possibly large, fixed sets of alternatives.
  5.  Textboxes with values to be validated using regular expressions.
  6.  Likert scale items.
  7.  Numerical values or intervals from ranges.
  8.  Sorting elements into sequences, e.g., to prioritize goals.
  9.  Ranked voting.
  10. Quadratic voting.
  11. Interactive diagrams, e.g., pie charts with sizeable slices.
  12. Selecting one or more points or regions on maps, e.g., to express where on a city map that a new school or stadium should be constructed.
  13. Selecting one or more dates, times, or ranges on calendars.
  14. Textboxes for open-ended text (see also: [1])
     *   These could be utilized to provide follow-up responses indicating rationales, justifications, or arguments for answers to previous items.
     *   Words, sentences, and paragraphs can be mapped to mathematical vectors, a.k.a., embedding vectors, for analysis.

How might these kinds of items interoperate with multimodal dialogue systems, chatbots, and with secure, decentralized opinion polling and voting systems, e.g., Vocdoni [2]?

After some preliminary research, the Vocdoni ballot protocol [3][4] is efficient and versatile for voting, ranked voting, and quadratic voting. It supports many of the listed scenarios above (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). However, it doesn’t seem to yet support text-string fields (5, 14) or other structured data values, e.g., JSON objects (11, 12, 13). I will reach out to Vocdoni, upcoming, with a feature request describing these listed scenarios (5, 11, 12, 13, 14).

Do any other kinds of items for educational assessment and/or public-opinion surveys come to mind with which to expand on that 14-item list? Thank you.



Best regards,

Adam Sobieski


[1] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/methodology/406922/natural-language-processing-aids-open-ended-questions.aspx

[2] https://vocdoni.io/

[3] https://docs.vocdoni.io/architecture/data-schemes/ballot-protocol.html

[4] https://blog.aragon.org/vocdoni-ballot-protocol/