WHY ASK QUESTIONS?
Questions serve a variety of purposes, including:
- To actively involve students in the lesson
- To increase motivation or interest
- To evaluate students’ preparation
- To check on the completion of work
- To develop critical thinking skills
- To review previous lessons
- To nurture insights
- To assess achievement or mastery of goals and objectives
- To stimulate independent learning
ASKING BETTER QUESTIONS
Traditionally questions are classified according to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy is a hierarchy of increasingly complex intellectual skills arranged in six categories:
- Knowledge – recall data or information
- Comprehension – understand meaning
- Application – use a concept in a new situation
- Analysis – separate concepts into parts; distinguish between facts and inferences
- Synthesis – combine parts to form new meaning
- Evaluation – make judgments about the value of ideas or products
Higher cognitive questions (open-ended, interpretive, evaluative, inquiry, inferential, and synthesis questions) involve the mental manipulation of information to produce or support an answer.
* Teachers most often ask lower-order, convergent questions that rely on students’ factual recall of prior knowledge rather than asking higher-order, divergent questions that promote deep thinking, requiring students to analyze and evaluate concepts.*
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Well-crafted questions lead to new insights, generate discussion, and promote the comprehensive exploration of subject matter. Poorly constructed questions can stifle learning by creating confusion, intimidating students, and limiting creative thinking.
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Other Factors to Consider:Wait time
Feedback: Redirecting, Probing, and Responding
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