Creating Tasks from Scratch with the Nurture Assistant

Watch the video above, or follow the steps below.

Starting from scratch is how you create a brand new task when you want the Nurture AI Assistant to generate the questions for you. This tutorial walks through every field on the creation screen and what it does.

How you refine or edit the task after it is generated is covered in a separate tutorial. This one focuses on setting up and generating the task.

The description

This is your free text field for telling the Assistant what kind of task you want. You can keep it as simple as a topic (for example, “World War II”) and there is enough in that for the Assistant to work with. But you can also get really specific with what you ask for. The more detail you give, the closer the first draft will be to what you need.

For example, you could specify the exact split of question types: “give students three multiple choice questions and two short answer questions.”

Supporting material and sources (optional)

If you have a source, like a reading comprehension, an article, or any other material, you can upload it here. The Assistant will generate questions based on that source.

Important: this is different from uploading a worksheet or exam question. When you upload a source here, Nurture creates new questions from it. If you have a worksheet with questions you want to keep exactly as they are, use the “upload a worksheet” option instead.

Watch out: if the source you upload already has questions on it, the Assistant will use those questions first and then add additional ones on top to meet your requested question count. So if your source has 8 questions and you set the count to 12, it will use those 8 and generate 4 more. You can change or replace those questions later using the edit with AI feature.

Number of questions

Set how many questions you want. The default is five. The more questions you request, the longer the initial generation may take.

Style of questions

Choose the style: essay, short answer, multiple choice, true/false, or fill in the blank.

One thing to know: the style affects how the questions are written, but students still answer them the same way. They either type all their answers into one text field in Nurture, complete their answers in a document and upload it, or handwrite their answers and upload photos. There are not separate answer boxes per question.

Question difficulty

By default this is set to the expected level for your curriculum. You can make it less challenging or more challenging. This factors in your student reading age and whatever curriculum boundary documents you select.

Reading age

Pulled from your classroom settings. You can change it here for a specific task if needed.

Curriculum boundary

Select whichever documents from your curriculum boundary are relevant to this task. These documents inform the style of questions, the success criteria, and the marking scheme if you generate one later.

AI effort

Choose between a faster response or a thinking response. The thinking response takes slightly longer but generally produces higher quality output. The time difference is not major.

Generating and reviewing

Click Generate Task and wait for it to finish (usually one to three minutes). Once generated you will see:

• Title for the task.
• Questions in the style and count you requested. If you specified a split (for example, three multiple choice and two short answer), it will follow that. If you did not specify, it will make a best guess.
• Source (if you uploaded one). This is available to students by default. If you do not want students to see the source, you can remove it. If students need to read it (for example, a reading comprehension), leave it.
• Success criteria. Every task in Nurture has at least one. By default, Nurture generates between three and five. These are aligned to Dylan Wiliam’s pedagogy on best practices for success criteria: measurable and achievable goals for students.
• References. Click to see which curriculum documents the Assistant used and how it shaped the questions and success criteria.

Marking scheme (optional)

You can add a marking scheme after the task is generated:

• Type one manually in the text field.
• Upload one as an attachment. Make sure it matches the questions you have set and the maximum marks.
• Generate one with AI. The Assistant creates a marking scheme based on your exact questions and the maximum marks you have set.

The AI-generated marking scheme can be quite detailed. You can edit it further with AI later (covered in the refining tutorial).