Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - E-Assessment

Definition

Matching requires a recurrent matching from the question to the answer options. On the one hand, it is necessary to select the best matching pair of question and answer from a limited number of options, e.g. matching from countries and capitals (Germany - Berlin). On the other hand, it may be required to select only the matching answers from a much larger selection, e.g. when marking a word type (adjective) mentioned in the question within a text.

Depending on the design of the so-called pool, there is the possibility that answers can be used once, several times or not at all.

Types of matching

1. Drag & Drop: The answers are moved appropriately, e.g. for cloze texts or picture-text matching. Multiple, linked pieces of information are asked for.
2. Identification or marking: The answers are marked in a picture or a text by clicking on it, e.g. when assigning medical terms on a picture of the human body. Exactly one piece of information is asked to be found.

Challenges

As with the answer-choice method, it may be difficult to create equivalent tasks for a pool, e.g. in the above example for marking, there is the possibility to change either the word type (different difficulty!) or the text excerpt (possibly also different complexity) and thus, on top of that, to change the number of cases to be marked. This calls into question the equivalence of different tasks from the pool, so that the examination loses legal certainty.