Hints in Runestone assignment pages

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Apologies if I'm doing something wrong and this belongs on -support. 

If an exercise is authored with a hint, and the publication file says to display hints, the hint shows up in the book, like it should. 

But it does not show up on the Runestone assignment page. Is that by design, or an oversight? Is there an option to have them show up? (If not, should there be?)

[Rob Beezer]

Runestone does not really have a notion of a hint. And not really answers or solutions. A problem, say a multiple choice, "knows" it's answer and can tell the reader if they are correct.

But a PreTeXt-authored hint lies "outside" the interactive widget in the book. And, iirc, we do not communicate it via the manifest for use on the assignment page.

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Thanks. That's good enough for me. 

I'll let this serve as a reminder to students that they should really be doing their reading problems *while reading*, and not on the assignment page!

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[Oscar Levin]

What Rob said.  I'll add that I don't think we should communicate it to the manifest.  I'm teaching from Active Calculus this semester and find myself wishing there was a way to turn off the the assignment view completely.  Of course that would only be helpful if there was some way to make the assignment more clear inside the book, which would require a clear marking system for showing which exercises are assigned, and perhaps including additional non-book exercises "in the book".  So a much bigger project, but one that I think is worth pursuing instead of trying to make the assignment page better. 

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Yes, that is something that my students picked up on quickly: they'd really like to be able to tell which exercises are assigned at the end of each section.

I know we've talked about it, but I expect it's not an easy job to implement.

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[Bradley Miller]

We are already “decorating” many exercises to show the status of a students answer, correct/incorrect.  It’s also important to remember that there are many different teaching styles, and many teachers like the assignment page because it consolidates student work into a single place.  I hesitate to use the word worksheet, but I think especially at the HS level that is how the assignment page is viewed.  Also we can’t just eliminate the assignment page because many instructors write their own questions that do not appear in the body of the book.  Maybe less of a use case for author/instructors!

I think there are a couple of key questions to answer:

1. Which exercises should be decorated as assigned?  Many instructors create all of their assignments before the semester starts.  Should it be currently visible?  Currently due?  The same rules we use to automatically score a question which take into account visibility, due date, whether late submission is allowed and whether the scores are released.

2. How should they be decorated?  Several assignments might be visible and available for students to work on, but students probably most care about the next one that is due.  So should the due date be part of the decoration?

Brad

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On Sep 18, 2025, at 07:28, Sean Fitzpatrick <dsfitz...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Andrew Scholer]

I want both.

Hints are explicitly authored as part of an exercise. If the exercise is presented, the hint should be as well. Yes, the assignment page by necessity rips exercises out of context, but the hint isn't context. It is part of the exercise.

I think there is a good case for moving hints up into exercises even when viewed in context. Right now, if the exercise occupies significant vertical space (e.g. big bunch of starter code in an editor), the hint gets pushed down below the page break. If a student doesn't scroll past the visible end of the exercise they will be unaware that a hint exists.

Technically, it would not be hard to move the hint into the manifest that RS uses to display exercises and make Runestone responsible for rendering that HTML. RS already acts as a pass through for other HTML that was generated from PTX markup.

As for indicating assigned exercises in context, yes it would be a fair chunk of work, but it seems manageable. I think there might need to be some caching involved - trying to query the DB for every question on every render might get painful. 

Building on Oscar's suggestion to neuter the assignment page... I could see a course level switch that renders the assignment page using only exercise titles, score and "Show this question" links. That would be pretty easy to implement.

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[Sean Fitzpatrick]

I think the assignment page is good for homework assignments (problem sets).

Some students would prefer to do those in the book is they could see which ones are assigned, but it's not a big deal if they can't. 

For reading assignments we're including exercises, especially for PROTEUS, because we have all these short answer problems and we can't see what students write if they're not assigned. 

But our main goal with a reading assignment is to get students to do the reading! And there's a tendency among many students to use the assignment page as a way to circumvent the readings while completing the reading assignments.

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[Bradley Miller]

Sean,

Have you tried going to the grading page, and instead of choosing assignment, choose chapter.  Then select the short answer question you want to view and select all students.

I’ve not tried that in a long time, and is a vestige of days gone by where teachers would not make an assignment in Runestone but tell students you need to read this chapter and do the exercises.

In any case, short answer questions have become kind of a special case as one of the view non-autogradable question types.  So maybe focusing on designing a good way to allow instructors to view and grade short answer questions is a separate and worthy task.

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On Sep 18, 2025, at 08:21, Sean Fitzpatrick <dsfitz...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Chrissy Safranski]

>I could see a course level switch that renders the assignment page using only exercise titles, score and "Show this question" links. That would be pretty easy to implement.

I made an issue on runestone a few weeks ago about this: like Sean is saying, I would like this on an assignment-level switch.  I don't mind students doing after-class work from the assignment page, but for pre-class reading, I want them actually inside the book, reading and answering questions in-context.  However, if some assignments are visible in Runestone and some aren't, that's confusing.  

I also make assignments in Canvas, so I tell them to look there to manage their deadlines.  I experimented with making a dummy assignment in Runestone with no problems, whose description was to tell them to do the problems in-context, but then I have 2 assignments for every section of reading: one visible with no problems and one invisible that actually contains the problems for grading. I haven't found a perfect solution that manages student and professor expectations and work. 

It would just be great if the instructor could toggle a switch for "don't show problems on assignment page" and then the assignment shows in their list of assignments but doesn't show the problems when they click on it. It could even instead show a message "you must do the problems in this assignment from in-context."  But your suggested implementation would work too!

Chrissy

[Oscar Levin]

I'm thinking long term here, not suggesting that this is something that should happen soon.  When Sean and others say that the assignment page is good for homework sets, I think that is an example of us thinking in the way that previous technology has limited us: it used to be that the textbook and the homework system were two seperate things, so we are used to thinking of doing a set of assigned problems divorced from the textbook.  I'm suggesting that maybe we should not take it for granted that this is a good idea.

Is there a good reason that the textbook can't have empty spaces for where instructor written and assigned questions get populated?   Imagine a template right before the #exercises that says which of the following problems are part of the assignment that is due on this upcoming date.   And as the student scrolls down they see each of those problems highlighted with a light green background and icon in the right margin that when you hover shows the due date.  Additional problems that are not usually in the textbook are inserted between other exercises or after them all, however the instructor wishes (and decorated to demonstrate this is an additional exercise).  

The assignment page still lists the assignments and maybe gives links to each individual problem in context (without showing the problem), but does have a check box for when that problem is completed correctly.

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Brad, I have not tried that, but I will.

Thanks for the suggestion! 

The trouble with short answer is that feedback must be provided by a human. 

We wrote many of them for PROTEUS. Great for a class of 30.

Providing feedback for 200 is proving to be a challenge. 

I've got a dedicated TA with 4 hours per week for the job. I think that lets me give feedback on one question per week!

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext-dev/B0F17087-72C9-4D8E-B803-F8CAC8B32848%40runestone.academy.

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Returning to this: 

I tried Brad's suggestion of viewing by chapter on the grading page. 

This does seem to be a good solution for viewing student responses and giving feedback. 

The grades they get for the question on a corresponding assignment do not show, but this is ok. 

However the recurring frustration is that students are trying to do *reading* assignments without ever doing any reading, and then complaining that they only got 5 out of 6, because to get the 6th point they had to at least open the correct section in the textbook! 

I would switch to simply assigning a section with a minimum activity count, except: 

(a) I don't think this is what the PROTEUS team wants us to do

(b) This would bring me back to an earlier problem: a section might have 10 activities, 5 of which are exercises, and 5 of which are videos. 

I don't want the videos to count towards the activity count, but we currently don't have a way to avoid this for PreTeXt books