Interview Detective

An activity builder for research methods classes: students read a study’s clues, reconstruct its interview protocol, and get an automatic score.

STEP 1Add one or more case files: a study’s abstract, research questions and findings as clues, plus its real interview protocol as the answer key.

STEP 2Preview the activity exactly as students will see it, and try writing a few questions yourself.

STEP 3Download the student activity: one HTML file to post in your learning platform or send to students.

Activity

Case files

How it works

Students choose a case, study the clues, and write the interview questions they think the researchers asked.
“Ready to Compare” reveals your answer key beside their questions, with arrows linking similar ones.
Scoring uses TF-IDF cosine similarity, a standard text-similarity measure. Each student question is compared with every protocol question; a protocol question is matched at a similarity of 0.45 or higher and close at 0.25–0.44. Score = (matched + ½ close) ÷ protocol questions × 100. Students see the similarity on every arrow. Open-ended questions are reported separately.
Students can save a typewritten “case report” image to submit.
Your work saves automatically in this browser. To edit a finished activity later, use Open an activity and choose its downloaded HTML file.

Starter cases reproduce open-access articles under their Creative Commons licenses (CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-NC 4.0), with citation, link and license shown to students.

Everything you enter is built into the file you download, including abstracts and images, so use material you have the right to share with your students (for example, open-access articles).