Tracking number of attempts to successfully answer a MC question

[moyco]

I have a number of MC and T/F questions where I need to track the number of attempts it takes for a user to answer the question correctly. The T/F is easy because I'm only allowing 1 attempt, so I can can check for a pass/fail. However, the MC questions allow 2 attempts. If a user answers it correctly, I need to know if it was on the 1st try or 2nd and there doesn't seem to be a way to track that (not that I can find).

I created 2 user variables for each question, 1 for the answer choice and 1 for the attempts, but there doesn't seem to be a way to populate them until the max attempts has been reached which defeats the entire purpose.

There has to be some way to populate an attempts counter before the max has been reached. Obviously Captivate is tracking that somewhere, but I can't find a system variable that seems to fit.

I'm also tracking quiz attempts and need to aggregate the question attempts across the total quiz attempts, but first things first. I'll be happy to get the question attempts information once at this point.

I'm using Captivate 8.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Message was edited by: Karen Moyes I changed the subject line and tried to better explain what needs to happen.

[RodWard]

Captivate interactivity is always event-based.  In Quiz Question slides you really only have three events to work with:

• On Slide Enter - happens everytime you enter the slide
• On Success - when the learner enters a correct answer, but doesn't fire until they quit the feedback.
• On Last Attempt - when the learner hasn't answered correctly and has exhausted all allowed attempts.

There is no system variable available to you that tracks every time the user answers incorrectly, regardless of the number of allowed attempts.

So to have any chance of recording what YOU are asking for, you would need to set the number of attempts on all questions to 1 so that the On Last Attempt event could be used to trigger an Assign action to a User Variable.

[moyco]

Hi and thanks for answering.

I am aware of the events I have to use with the quiz questions, I was just bemoaning the fact that while Captive nicely tracks your answer attempts for you so you can add different success and fail options, there's no easy way to grab that info.

I figured out how to track the question attempts without having to change the number of attempts on the MC choice questions, so I kept them at 2 attempts. I had to create a lot of variables and some fairly complex if statements with multiple decisions for both the success and fail in order to do that, however.

Now "all" I have to do is duplicate all that effort for each quiz attempt, which will not be very easy as I'm already by-passing the built-in Captivate default of going to the 1st quiz question on retake and have a lot of other customization on certain slides that has to be taken into account with subsequent quiz attempts. Once I have that all set, I'll be happy to share, although it will take a lot of screen shots!

[Lilybiri]

I wonder if you tried it out with reusable variables and shared actions? If you post more details about your present solution, maybe I could offer some tips. Captivate 8 has the full features for shared actions.

Parameters in Shared Actions - Captivate 7 vs. 8 - Captivate blog

[moyco]

I would like to use shared actions if possible. I need to do this for 18-20 modules that have either 5 or 10 graded questions, with a mix of T/F and MC. I'll try to explain what is happening without boring you too much  

First, the user can take the entire quiz up to 3 times before they either pass or fail that module. If they fail the module the 1st or 2nd time, then they are taken back to the beginning of the module (not the 1st quiz question) and must go through it completely again. They must navigate linearly through and visit each slide each time. Until they pass the quiz, they can't get to the final "completion" page and successfully complete the module. If they fail the quiz  times, it stops on the quiz results page and they must contact someone to reset it (or not hire them for that position).

Within a module, there are quiz questions. T/F questions allow 1 attempt, and MC allow 2 attempts. Tracking attempts for the TF is easy as it will always be 1 and then Captivate reports pass/fail for that question. Even so, we want to track whether or not the question was answered correctly each time the quiz was taken by a user (if more than one quiz attempt).

I created 6 variables for each question. One variable for the question answer and one for the number of attempts to answer that question for each quiz attempt. So, for question 1 the 1st time through the quiz the variables are "q1_1" and "q1_1attempt" question 2 variables are "q2_1" and "q2_1attempt" and so forth. For each quiz attempt, I change the number after the underscore (e.g., q1_2, q1_3).

I need to keep the data populated into the variables until the module is completed, so can't overwrite them, but I figure I can re-use those variable across each module. For testing purposes, I created a page in the file that lists all the variables across all 3 quiz attempts. I so far have it working for 2 complete quiz attempts and will post a screen shot of those results.

I can go deeper into the logic for a specific MC question if you need it, but let me know if that is enough information for now.

[moyco]

As you can see, there are 5 questions in this file. The first time through I failed all the questions using the max attempts. Q1 is TF and the others are all MC. The 2nd time through the quiz, I answered all questions correctly the 1st time. You can see that by the number of attempts. My next test is to try and answer 1 or 2 questions correctly the 2nd time but fail the quiz to see if the logic still works. Then I'll update the actions to add the decisions for the 3rd quiz attempt.

[moyco]

By the way, I decided that not having the 1st incorrect answer is an acceptable tradeoff. As long as I can track the attempts per question and have at least the last answer, I can work around the rest.