Eleven Question Types. One Authoring Model. Ten That Mark Themselves.
A teacher's tour of every question type in Lesson Commons — and why self-correcting exercises change how students practice.
April 21, 2026 — By Brent Miller
Most quiz platforms give you multiple choice and call it a day. Maybe true/false if you're lucky. If you need anything more — a cloze passage, a matching exercise, a sentence transformation — you're back to paper, or you're fighting a platform that treats "advanced" question types as an afterthought bolted onto a multiple-choice engine.
Lesson Commons ships with eleven question types, and ten of them self-correct. Students get immediate, detailed feedback the moment they submit — no teacher marking, no waiting. That matters, because a teacher's time should go into designing learning, not running a marking factory. Self-correcting practice lets students work at their own pace, discover their own mistakes, and iterate toward mastery — between lessons, on the bus, on their own time.
Each question type was designed for a real classroom need, not to pad a feature list. Here's the full set — what each type does, why it exists, and what makes it different.
1. Multiple Choice
The workhorse. Single-correct or multi-correct variants with per-option partial credit: if a question has three correct answers and a student picks two of them, they earn two-thirds of the marks.
Options can be shuffled per student so answer-sharing doesn't work. And every option can carry its own feedback message — not just "wrong," but why it's wrong and what the student should think about instead.
2. True / False
Simple on the surface, but configurable where it matters. Three display modes — "True / False," "Correct / Incorrect," or visual checkmark and cross — so you can match the style to the task — and translated into 12 languages. A penalty option means guessing on a 50/50 question actually costs something.
3. Simple Gap Fill
A sentence with a blank. The student types their answer. You define multiple accepted forms — "don't," "do not," "can't" — and optionally toggle case sensitivity on or off. It's the simplest text-entry type, and common for vocabulary and grammar practice, or quick comprehension checks.
4. Word Bank Cloze
A full passage with multiple gaps and a shared word pool displayed alongside it. Students pick from the bank to fill each gap. You can add distractors — extra words that don't belong anywhere — to raise the challenge. As words get used, they're struck through so students can track what's left. Each gap gets its own feedback.
5. Multi-Gap Cloze
A passage with numbered gaps. Students type a word into each one. Each gap has its own list of accepted answers and its own case-sensitivity setting. Partial credit scores each gap independently — get six out of eight right and you earn six-eighths of the marks.
If you're a Cambridge English Exam preparer like me, you'll see this in Part 2 of Paper 1 of the Cambridge First (B2) exam.
6. Multiple Choice Cloze
The dropdown cousin of Multi-Gap Cloze. Every gap in the passage gets a three- or four-option dropdown menu. Options can be shuffled per gap. Feedback goes all the way down to the individual distractor — you can explain why "however" doesn't work in gap 3 even though it looks plausible (e.g. Cambridge First Paper 1 Part 1).
7. Matching
Pair stems with targets. "Match the vocabulary to the definitions." "Match the dates to the events." You add the pairs and optionally throw in distractor targets — extra options that don't match anything — to prevent process-of-elimination solving.
Scoring is proportional: get four out of six pairs right, earn four-sixths of the marks. Students see stems on the left and select targets from dropdown menus on the right.
8. Ordering
Three levels, one interaction model:
- Word level — build a sentence from scrambled words.
- Sentence level — arrange sentences into a coherent paragraph. (Coming 06/2026)
- Paragraph level — structure paragraphs into a complete text. (Coming 06/2026)
Students drag and drop on desktop, tap to place on mobile. Scoring is proportional, so students are rewarded for getting most of the order right even when they miss a pair. This is a question type most platforms either skip or get wrong, and it's invaluable for teaching text structure, logical sequencing, and the kind of discourse organisation that standardised exams test but most platforms can't assess.
9. Short Answer
A single free-text response — no passage, no gap, just a question and a text box. And it autocorrects: define the acceptable forms of the answer (including alternate spellings, contractions, or phrasings) and Lesson Commons marks the student's response the moment they submit, with feedback right there.
Use it for factual recall, definitions, or any task where you want students to produce a written answer after the question rather than pick from options.
10. Essay
Long-form writing. You set a word-count target, an expected line count (so the text area renders at a reasonable size), and a rubric field where you describe your grading criteria. Students can write, save, and submit essays today.
One honest note on this one: the Essay question type is the only one of the eleven that isn't self-correcting, and the teacher correction screen is still in development. In the current beta, essays are captured and stored but not yet scorable inside Lesson Commons. If you're building a course that relies on graded long-form writing, know that teacher marking for this type is on the roadmap rather than shipped (summer 2026).
11. Sentence Transformation
The most specialised type in the set — and the one we're proudest of.
It's built for language teachers, and particularly for higher-level Cambridge English Exam preparation (e.g. Cambridge C1 Advanced Paper 1 Part 4 Key Word Transformations). The format: students see an original sentence and must rewrite it using a mandatory keyword, keeping the meaning the same. In other contexts, this has been called a "constrained paraphrase" question. The engine validates the answer in chunks — it checks the start of the response, the end of the response, and enforces the keyword. It handles spacing and supports per-chunk partial credit.
This is the hardest question type to auto-score because the correct answer isn't a fixed string — it's a pattern with acceptable variations. We spent more time on this type than any other, and it works. That saves teachers a lot of work writing the accepted questions and correcting the answers.
Eleven types, your curriculum
Whether you teach a secondary-school English class, design materials for a university department, produce content for a publisher, or build onboarding and compliance modules inside a company — the same eleven question types are here, in the same editor, behaving the same way across every context.
What changes is how you use them. A language teacher will be a bigger fan of cloze passages, word bank clozes, and sentence transformations than colleagues from other disciplines. A history teacher lives inside multiple choice, matching, and ordering. A corporate trainer running a new-hire onboarding path builds quick multiple-choice checks between video modules and a short-answer reflection at the end of the path. A course designer producing a foreign language course might use all eleven.
The question types don't care what subject you're teaching. They were designed as general tools: ten of them self-correct, putting immediate feedback in your learners' hands without waiting for you to mark anything. This allows students to check their knowledge on the spot, which has been shown to dramatically increase learning.
Try them
The LC Editor is a free download during the beta. Build a cloze passage, a matching exercise, or a sentence transformation set, and publish it to your learners in LC Learn.
Beta access is open at lessoncommons.com/beta.
Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers, trainers, and course designers. The editor, delivery platform, and open transfer format (LC.JSON) are in active development. Follow our updates at lessoncommons.com/news.
This article was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). The author defined the purpose, audience, and main ideas, directed the editorial approach, and edited the final text. Claude assisted with structure and drafting.