The Essay question is open ended. As an educator you can provide any type of prompt you’d like and ask students to write anything from a sentence, to a paragraph, to a full-fledged essay.
The Essay question type is most popular with ELA teachers. ELA teachers incorporate the question type into their assessments because they are interested in having students write sentences, poems, essays, paragraphs, or arguments to demonstrate understanding of a text, grammatical functions, or to demonstrate general English competency. Students entering text are not prompted by Spell Check so they must carefully check the document themselves before submitting a question
Math teachers might use the Essay question type when they want a student to fully explain their work or to complete an applied mathematics problem. Science teachers sometimes want students to explain a concept or outcome of a science experiment and back their claim based on evidence. History teachers could ask students to write essays about historical events or figures. No matter which subject a teacher teaches, the open-ended nature of the Essay question leaves the purpose of the question and the expected response up to the teacher who prepares the question.
Setting up an essay question is easy. Simply use the text editor box to type, format text, and/or add media to the Essay question prompt. When students respond, they also have the ability to format their responses and include media, too. Due to its unique, flexible, and open-ended nature, the Essay question is the only question type that does not autograde. The teacher must review student work to provide a score. While reviewing student responses, the teacher can also leave the student a note, just as he/she is able to do for any question item.
Note: Premium teachers can use rubrics to grade Essay questions. Interested in learning about premium? Take a look at Edulastic District Version or contact our support team at support@edulastic-web.snapwiz.net.
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This Essay Question post is a part of our Featured Question Types series.
Last week we kicked off the series with the Text Entry. Next week we’ll continue with Label an Image.