prompt n.

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

"prompt" is also common in rhetoric/composition contexts.

-Matt Gordon


On 3/15/10 12:24 PM, "victor steinbok" <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

In psychometrics, the body of a multiple-choice question is usually referred
to as "the prompt", but ed publishers call it "stem" or "root" with the
answer choices all referred to as "distractors" (even though one of them is
supposed to be correct). ;-) The editors I've worked with sometimes would
differentiate between the "question stem" and "prompt", the latter being a
general comment that applied to multiple questions, including instructions.
This seems reverse of what test specialists use, but these two groups rarely
talk to each other. But it can get very confusing if you work with both...

VS-)

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:

>
> Typically, when I assign a paper to a class, I will write out and
> distribute several sentences of instructions and advice.  All of a sudden
> (it seems to me), my students are referring to such a document as "the
> prompt." (I would call it simply "the assignment"--or maybe, if I wanted to
> sound informal, "the specs").
>
> When asked about the term, some of my students associate it with their AP
> classes in high school. Is it a (behaviorist?) term that emanates from
> colleges of education? The use doesn't match any of the entries for _prompt_
> n.2 in the OED.
>
> --Charlie
>
>

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