Effective Questioning Techniques

1. Prepare your students for extensive questioning. Teachers who use lots of questions in a classroom might have to justify their use of questioning to students. Some students conclude that questions imply evaluation, monitoring, and efforts to control students. Students need to know that questions seek clarification and elaboration of students' ideas in order to make their thinking visible, and to help the teacher address misconceptions.

2. Use both pre-planned and emerging questions. Prepare your discussion by identifying the goal and pre-plan a number of questions that will help achieve the goal. Recall that there are a number of discussion types designed to introduce new concepts, focus the discussion on certain items, steer the discussion in specific directions, or identify student knowledge level on the topic. Questions derived from the discussion itself can help guide the discussion.

3. Use a wide variety of questions. It is best to begin a discussion by asking divergent questions, and moving to convergent questions as the goal is approached. Questions should be asked that require a broad range of intellectual (higher and lower order) thinking skills. Use Bloom's Taxonomy or Rhodes Typology for a guide to the type of questions you can ask. Avoid using simple YES or NO type questions as they encourage students to respond without fully thinking through an idea.

4. Avoid the use of rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are those to which answers are already known, or merely seek affirmation of something stated previously such as the following: Right?, Don't you?, Correct?, Okay?, and Yes? More often than not, rhetorical questions are unintentional, and are suggestive of habit or nervousness.

5. State questions with precision. Poor wording and the use of rapid-fire, multiple questions related to the same topic can result in confusion. Easy does it. Repeat the question, and explain it in other words if students don't seem to understand. One question at a time or else students won't know how to respond.

6. Pose whole-group questions unless seeking clarification. Direct questions to the entire class. Handle incomplete or unclear responses by reinforcing what is correct and then asking follow-up questions. Ask for additional details, seek clarification of the answer, or ask the student to justify a response. Redirect the question to the whole group of the desired response is not obtained.

7. Use appropriate wait time. Wait time encourages all students to think about the response, as they do not know who is going to be called upon to answer the question. The teacher can significantly enhance the analytic and problem-solving skills of students by allowing sufficient wait times before responding, both after posing a question and after the answer is given. This allows everyone to think about not only the question but also the response provided by the student. Three to five seconds in most cases; longer in some, maybe up to 10 seconds for higher-order questions.

8. Select both volunteers and non-volunteers to answer questions. Female students frequently take longer to respond; give them adequate time to do so. Picking on the student who is first to raise his or her hand will often leave many students uninvolved in the discussion. Some teachers use a randomized approach where they pick student names from a hat, so to speak. This ensures equitable participation, and keeps students intellectually engaged.

9. Respond to answers provided by students. Listen carefully to your students as they respond; let them finish their responses unless they are completely missing the point. "Echo" their responses in your own words. Acknowledge correct answers and provide positive reinforcement. Identify incorrect responses and ask for alternative explanations from other students. Repeat student answers when the other students have not heard the answers.

10. Maintain a positive class atmosphere. Not all students will be completely clear in their thinking or enunciation and, invariably, some won't be paying attention. Nevertheless, avoid the use of sarcasm, unreasonable reprimands, accusations, and personal attacks.

11. Throw back student questions. Sometimes student will restate the teachers questions in their own words and ask the teacher for a response -- getting the teacher to do the intellectual work. When such an event occurs, restate the question, and pose it to the class.

12. Interrelate previous comments. As the discussion moves along, be certain to interrelate previous student comments in an effort to draw a conclusion. Avoid doing the work of arriving at a conclusion for your student.

13. Restate discussion goal periodically. Sometimes the purpose of a discussion will become clouded, and even go off topic. Periodically restate the goal of the discussion so that it is clearly before the students. It is particularly important to ask questions near the end of your discussion that help make it clear whether or not the goal has been achieved. Identify areas in need of clarification.

14. Take your time. Hard intellectual work takes considerable effort, and students might not be terribly familiar with the thought processes required to draw conclusions. Much of there education might have required them merely to parrot back things previously told them. Don't give up on students. If a discussion is worth doing at all, it is worth doing correctly.

15. Equitably select students. Remember that males have a tendency to "jump up and shout out" responses whereas females tend to be more circumspect and, therefore, delayed in responding. Control situations where inequitable responding is likely to occur.

Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy

The goal of classroom questioning is not to determine whether students have learned something (as would be the case in tests, quizzes, and exams),but rather to guide students to help them learn necessary information and material. Questions should be used to teach students rather than to just test students!

Teachers frequently spend a great deal of classroom time testing students through questions. In fact, observations of teachers at all levels of education reveal that most spend more than 90 percent of their

instructional time testing students (through questioning). And most of the questions teachers ask are typically factual questions that rely on short-term memory

Many years ago, an educator named Benjamin Bloom developed a classification system we now refer to as Bloom's Taxonomy to assist teachers in recognizing their various levels of question-asking (among other things). The system contains six levels, which are arranged in hierarchical form, moving from the lowest level of cognition (thinking) to the highest level of cognition (or from the least complex to the most complex)

Knowledge

This is the lowest level of questions and requires students to recall information. Knowledge questions usually require students to identify information in basically the same form it was presented. Some examples of knowledge questions include …

“What is the biggest city in Japan?” “Who wrote War and Peace?” “How many ounces in a pound?”

Words often used in knowledge questions include know, who, define, what, name, where ,list, and when

Comprehension

Simply stated, comprehension is the way in which ideas are organized into categories. Comprehension questions are those that ask students to take several bits of information and put them into a single category or grouping. These questions go beyond simple recall and require students to combine data together. Some examples of comprehension questions include …

“How would you illustrate the water cycle?” “What is the main idea of this story?” “If I put these three blocks together, what shape do they form?”

Words often used in comprehension questions include describe, use your own words, outline ,explain, discuss, and compare.

Application

At this level, teachers ask students to take information they already know and apply it to a new situation. In other words, they must use their knowledge to determine a correct response. Some examples of application questions include …

“How would you use your knowledge of latitude and longitude to locate Greenland?” “What happens when you multiply each of these numbers by nine?” “If you had eight inches of water in your basement and a hose, how would you use the hose to

get the water out?”

Words often used in application questions include apply, manipulate, put to use, employ, dramatize, demonstrate, interpret, and choose.

Analysis

An analysis question is one that asks a student to break down something into its component parts. To analyze requires students to identify reasons, causes, or motives and reach conclusions or generalizations. Some examples of analysis questions include …

“What are some of the factors that cause rust?” “Why did the United States go to war with England?” “Why do we call all these animals mammals?”

Words often used in analysis questions include analyze, why, take apart, diagram, draw conclusions, simplify, distinguish, and survey.

Synthesis

Synthesis questions challenge students to engage in creative and original thinking. These questions invite students to produce original ideas and solve problems. There's always a variety of potential responses to synthesis questions. Some examples of synthesis questions include …

“How would you assemble these items to create a windmill?” “How would your life be different if you could breathe under water?” “Construct a tower one foot tall using only four blocks.” “Put these words together to form a complete sentence.”

Words often used in synthesis questions include compose, construct, design, revise, create, formulate, produce, and plan.

Evaluation

Evaluation requires an individual to make a judgment about something. We are asked to judge the value of an idea, a candidate, a work of art, or a solution to a problem. When students are engaged in decision-making and problem-solving, they should be thinking at this level. Evaluation questions do not have single right answers. Some examples of evaluation questions include …

“What do you think about your work so far?” “What story did you like the best?” “Do you think that the pioneers did the right thing?” “Why do you think Benjamin Franklin is so famous?”

Words often used in evaluation questions include judge, rate, assess, evaluate, What is the best …,value, criticize, and compare

What does all this mean? Several things, actually! It means you can ask your students several different kinds of questions. If you only focus on one type of question, your students might not be exposed to higher levels of thinking necessary to a complete understanding of a topic. If, for example, you only ask students knowledge-based questions, then your students might think that learning (a specific topic) is nothing more than the ability to memorize a select number of facts.

You can use this taxonomy to help craft a wide range of questions—from low-level thinking questions to high-level thinking questions. If variety is the spice of life, you should sprinkle a variety of question types throughout every lesson, regardless of the topic or the grade level you teach.

Bloom's Taxonomy is not grade-specific. That is, it does not begin at the lower grades (kindergarten, first, second) with knowledge and comprehension questions and move upward to the higher grades (tenth, eleventh, twelfth) with synthesis and evaluation questions. The six levels of questions are appropriate for all grade levels.

Perhaps most important, students tend to read and think based on the types of questions they anticipate receiving from the teacher. In other words, students will tend to approach any subject as a knowledge-based subject if they are presented with an overabundance of knowledge-level questions throughout a lesson. On the other hand, students will tend to approach a topic at higher levels of thinking if they are presented with an abundance of questions at higher levels of thinking

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