Cloze Problems

Cloze (shortened from “closure”) questions are a common form of assessment, where the question takes the form of a word missing from a sentence. They’re sometimes referred to as “fill-in-the-blank” and “gap fill” questions.

The problem type was originally and most commonly used in language education, as it’s an effective way of testing language comprehension, and typically in that use-case more than one section is removed in order to test basic sentence construction skills, for example:

Today I went to the ____ and tried to buy three ____. The ____ refused, saying that ____ are illegal in my ______.

The other primary use of Cloze questions is in other fields as an alternative way of asking factual questions, for example:

______ is the capital of France.

Typically, the inputs available to answer Cloze questions are one of three common input types:

• Dropdown menus

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• Freeform text input (sometimes with a list of words provided depending on the intended question difficulty)
  
  

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• Drag and drop
  
  

On platforms that lack true Cloze functionality, this is often mimicked by using multiple choice input questions, but these are generally lacking as it’s almost impossible to fill in multiple blanks in a neat way, and the question is removed from the context, which somewhat defeats the object of the Cloze question: