Questioning Techniques

Did you know?

·      Teachers ask up to two questions every minute, up to 400 in a day, around 70,000 a year, or two to three million in the course of a career

·      Questioning accounts for up to a third of all teaching time, second only to the time devoted to explanation

·      Most questions are answered in less than a second. That's the average time teachers allow between posing a question and accepting an answer, throwing it to someone else, or answering it themselves

·      Research has found, however, that increasing the wait time improves the number and quality of the responses - three seconds for a lower-order question and more than 10 seconds for a higher-order question 

As teachers talk less, and students talk more in the classroom, the role of questions in the classroom changes. facilitating students interaction through questioning is at the heart of goot teaching.

What are some ways that you can integrate the use of questions in your classroom and student projects? You may want to click on the link below to read more about questioning.

http://educate.intel.com/en/ProjectDesign/InstructionalStrategies/Questioning/

Clearly, questioning is an integral part of the teaching process. But if you're going to be asking three million questions, it's probably worth making sure you ask the right ones in the right way. What can you do to improve your questioning technique? How can you present yourself as a mentor coaxing out answers, not an interrogator seeing who cracks first? And how can you get children to ask questions of you, so learning becomes an interactive dialogue, rather than an uninterrupted diatribe? 

According to  Socrates teaching is "the art of asking questions"; "Good learning starts with questions, not answers," says Guy Claxton, professor of learning.  Four hundred questions a day may seem a startling statistic, but a large proportion of these (anything between 30 and 60 per cent) are procedural rather than learning-based. In other words, they tend to be of the is-your-name-on-it? or have-you-finished-yet? variety.

However, questioning is still a significant means of knowledge transfer. It accounts for up to a third of all teaching time, second only to the time devoted to explanation. And many experts believe it should be even more prominent. questioning is believed to lead to more effective learning - and more enjoyable teaching - than explanation alone. 

 In order to effectively use the questioning techniques teachers need  to recognise various types of question - and the functions they serve. Generally speaking there are three categories of questions: empirical (requiring answers based on facts); conceptual (concerned with definitions and reasoning); and value questions (investigating personal beliefs and moral issues). Recently,  Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning has been effectively used as a model - where questions are pigeon-holed in six categories according to whether they test knowledge, comprehension, analysis, application, synthesis or evaluation.

The diagram above shows some of the activities for each level of bloom taxonomy. As you all know that the he simplest and most important distinction, recognized by all experts, is between lower-order questions, which require children to remember, and higher-order questions, which require them to think. As a general rule, lower-order or factual recall questions tend to be closed, with a single right answer, and are likely to be what, who, when or where. Higher-order are more likely to start with how, why or which, and tend to be open - with a range of possible responses. Below is a set of questions in each level that teachers in all levels can use in their classrooms

Blooms in detail

Level	Keywords
Knowledge	¨      What ¨      When ¨      Who ¨      Define	¨      Distinguish ¨      Identify ¨      List ¨      Name	¨      Recall ¨      Reorganise ¨      Show ¨      State	¨      Write ¨      Which ¨      Indicate ¨      Tell How
Comprehension	¨      Compare ¨      Conclude ¨      Contrast ¨      Demonstrate ¨      Predict ¨      Reorder ¨      Which	¨      Distinguish ¨      Estimate ¨      Explain ¨      Extend ¨      Extrapolate ¨      Rephrase ¨      Inform	¨      What ¨      Fill In ¨      Give an example of ¨      Hypothesise ¨      Illustrate ¨      Relate ¨      Tell in your own words
Application	¨      Apply ¨      Develop ¨      Test ¨      Consider	¨      Build ¨      Plan ¨      Choose ¨      How would	¨      Construct ¨      Solve ¨      Show your work ¨      Tell us	¨      Demonstrate ¨      Indicate ¨      Check out
Analysis	¨      Analysis ¨      Categorize ¨      Describe ¨      Classify ¨      Compare	¨      Discriminate ¨      Distinguish ¨      Recognize ¨      Support your ¨      Indicate the	¨      Relate ¨      Explain ¨      What assumption ¨      What do you

Synthesis	¨      Write ¨      Think of a way ¨      Create ¨      Propose a plan ¨      Put together ¨      What would be	¨      Suggest ¨      How ¨      Develop ¨      Make up ¨      What conclusion ¨      What major hypothesis	¨      Plan ¨      Formulate a solution ¨      Synthesize ¨      Derive
Evaluation	¨      What is ¨      Choose ¨      Evaluate ¨      Decide ¨      Judge ¨      Check the	¨      Select ¨      Which would you consider ¨      Defend ¨      Check ¨      What is most appropriate ¨      Indicate

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Which questions should I be asking?

Which questions should I be asking?

No one type is intrinsically better than another. Lower-order questions, for example, have an important part to play in checking knowledge. But most research suggests teachers ask too many of these basic recall questions and not enough thought-provoking, higher-order questions.

In Professor Cliffland,  during the first international conference on "Observation and Feedback" at Dubai British University in Dubai on May 19-20 2011, shared with the audience his findings of a study he conducted to investigate whether teaching skills are taught as many schools claim. He found out through observations checklist that even reputed schools did not teach thinking skills and that teachers failed in many occasions (lessons) to ask one thought-provoking question.

Research has shown that this kind of questioning isn't teaching at all, and  doesn't develop any thought processes - but makes those who don't know the answer feel like failures.

A report by US educationist Kathleen Cotton in 1988, which examined 37 research projects to do with questioning across the United States, came to two important conclusions. First, that at all ages, a combination of higher-order and lower-order questions was the most effective method. And second, that with pupils of top primary or secondary school age, increasing the proportion of higher-order questions to around 50 per cent brought significant gains in terms of student attitude and performance.