Editor’s Toolkit: Incorporating Interactive Skill-Builders (P. 3)

Fill in the blanks is a cloze activity in which students must type in missing words, phrases, and/or numerals to complete a list or paragraph.

Like drag the words, fill in the blank(s) activities help students learn and review essential content, and they can be applicable to nearly all subject areas. In contrast to drag the words, however, these exercises push students to recall and spell terms without the assistance of word banks. They can also be used creatively to set up math and lower-stakes application questions.

Examples by Discipline

• Behavioral & Social Sciences: Identify whether a set of variables each create a premise or a conclusion.
• Business & Management: Determine whether various situations depict strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats.
• Science, Math, & Engineering: Calculate the velocity of a commuter train on various trajectories.
• Humanities & Fine Arts: Add the correct second-language conjugations for a list of verbs.

Additional Resource: See Quick Guide: Frequently Used Skill-Builders

Mark the words is a differentiation activity in which students select the words that correspond to a set of criteria from material presented in either a list or a paragraph.

Mark the words activities can help students distill vocabulary, types of speech, and other pieces of information. They encourage students to practice their classification skills and refine their understanding of material by focusing on single sets of criteria, or categories, within larger contexts. These activities offer unique opportunities for classifying information within short pieces of text. They can also be useful precursors to text-based drag and drop exercises (described on the next page), which enable consideration of multiple sets of criteria and the separation of items into multiple categories.

Examples by Discipline

• Behavioral & Social Sciences: Indicate which countries border the Mediterranean Sea.
• Business & Management: Identify various stakeholders to include in a budgetary decision.
• Science, Math, & Engineering: Determine the medicines that could be prescribed for a particular condition.
• Humanities & Fine Arts: Find all the transitive verbs used in a passage.

Additional Resource: See Quick Guide: Frequently Used Skill-Builders