Week 2 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Listening & Audience Analysis

Course: Public Speaking — Fundamentals of Oral Communication (COMM 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Marchetti
Objective tested: Objective 2 — listening types & barriers; the three categories of audience analysis; adaptation.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 2.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-02-qti.xml (generated by the shared validated script — parses with 10 items, every single-answer item exactly one correct). The reusable item-bank entries and the Canvas placement block are at the bottom of this file.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 2 misconceptions named in the lecture outline.

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). The key difference between hearing and listening is that —
- A. hearing is something only trained speakers can do
- B. hearing is a physical/physiological act; listening is an intentional cognitive process ✅
- C. listening happens automatically whenever someone speaks
- D. hearing requires more mental effort than listening
Feedback: Hearing = sound waves register in your auditory system — automatic and mostly passive. Listening = you intentionally attend, work to understand, and respond. You can hear perfectly and still fail to listen.

Q2 (Matching — type of listening → its purpose). Match each type of listening to its primary purpose.
| Type of listening | Primary purpose |
|---|---|
| Discriminative | Detect tone and emotional meaning underneath the words |
| Comprehensive/Informational | Understand and retain the content of a message |
| Critical/Evaluative | Analyze and judge whether the evidence and reasoning are sound |
| Empathic/Therapeutic | Understand the speaker's feelings and provide support |
| Appreciative | Listen for pleasure and enjoyment |
Feedback: The most common mix-up: empathic (feelings/support) vs. comprehensive (content/information). A friend venting needs empathic listening, not a content analysis. Critical = evaluative, not hostile.

Q3 (MC). A speaker packs fifteen statistics into a three-minute presentation. Listeners stop tracking them halfway through and retain almost none. Which listening barrier does this best illustrate?
- A. pseudolistening
- B. information overload ✅
- C. prejudging
- D. physical noise
Feedback: Information overload occurs when more content arrives faster than listeners can process it, and retention collapses. A speaker's job includes managing the load — fewer, well-chosen statistics land better than a barrage.

Q4 (True / False). "Critical/evaluative listening means being hostile or trying to tear apart what the speaker says."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. Critical listening means evaluating the quality, credibility, and reasoning of a message — engaging the mind, not attacking the speaker. You can be a respectful, open-minded critical listener.

Q5 (MC). Your friend calls you, upset after a stressful week at work, and just needs to feel heard. Which type of listening serves them best?
- A. comprehensive/informational listening
- B. critical/evaluative listening
- C. empathic/therapeutic listening ✅
- D. discriminative listening
Feedback: Empathic listening is about understanding the speaker's feelings and experience, not analyzing the content. Your friend needs to feel understood, not fact-checked or evaluated.

Q6 (MC). A speaker researching a talk about campus commuting learns that 60% of the audience have a daily commute longer than 45 minutes. She notes this so she can use relevant examples. Which category of audience analysis is she using?
- A. demographic analysis ✅
- B. psychographic analysis
- C. situational analysis
- D. identification analysis
Feedback: Demographic analysis identifies the broad, observable characteristics of the audience — including how they get to campus. Psychographic would cover their attitudes or values about commuting; situational would cover the setting of the speech itself.

Q7 (MC). An audience of students who are required to attend a campus safety presentation (they had no choice) is best described as —
- A. a voluntary audience
- B. a captive audience ✅
- C. a psychographic audience
- D. a comprehensive audience
Feedback: A captive audience is required to attend. This matters for the speaker: captive listeners may arrive with lower motivation, so an early motivation-building move — connecting the topic to their interests — is often wise.

Q8 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following are the three recognized categories of audience analysis in public speaking?
- A. Demographic analysis (age, education, background) ✅
- B. Psychographic analysis (attitudes, beliefs, values) ✅
- C. Situational analysis (occasion, size, setting, time) ✅
- D. Rhetorical analysis (speaker's persuasive appeals)
- E. Linguistic analysis (word choice and vocabulary)
Feedback: The three categories are demographic, psychographic, and situational (A–C). Rhetorical analysis (D) is what listeners do when evaluating a speech's appeals; linguistic analysis (E) is not a standard audience-analysis category.

Q9 (MC). A speaker preparing a talk on healthy cooking discovers her audience is largely made up of college students. She then assumes every listener is "too busy to cook" and "prefers fast food." This is an example of —
- A. effective audience adaptation
- B. situational analysis
- C. stereotyping, not audience analysis ✅
- D. psychographic research
Feedback: Audience analysis identifies tendencies across a group to inform planning. Assuming every individual fits the demographic mold is stereotyping — and a speaker who does that will still miss the actual people in the room. Good analysis uses demographic findings to ask better questions, not to assign characteristics.

Q10 (MC). A speaker notes that her audience includes people who chose to attend a Saturday workshop on personal finance and that the room holds about 25 people in an informal setting. Which category of audience analysis do these observations primarily reflect?
- A. demographic analysis
- B. psychographic analysis
- C. situational analysis ✅
- D. common-ground analysis
Feedback: Situational analysis covers the context: occasion, audience size, physical setting, and — crucially — whether the audience is voluntary (chose to attend) or captive. All of the observations here are about the setting and circumstances, not about who the people are (demographic) or what they believe (psychographic).

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item (Q1, Q3, Q4, Q5, Q6, Q7, Q9, Q10) has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q8) marks all three categories correct (A–C) and requires D and E to be left unselected; the matching item (Q2) pairs five listening types to five distinct purposes, one-to-one. No statistic, quotation, or external source is used in any item — all items test standard public-speaking concepts and do not require external citation. No computation in this course.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=COMM1 · week=2 · objective=2 · topic=listening-audience-analysis and deposited in Item Bank: Week 2 — Listening & Audience Analysis. (Tags: q1 hearing-vs-listening, q2 listening-types-match, q3 barrier-overload, q4 critical-listening-myth, q5 empathic-listening, q6 demographic, q7 captive-audience, q8 three-categories, q9 analysis-vs-stereotyping, q10 situational.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 2 Quiz — Listening & Audience Analysis"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible = 10
grading_type    = points
due_offset_days = 6        # 6 days after module start
published       = true
shuffle_answers = true
provenance      = "~ Prof. Marchetti's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"