Research shows that 60% of questions require students to recall facts and teachers typically wait less than one second for a response. In turn, students ask very few learning related questions to their teachers. Research also shows that by increasing the frequency of higher order questions and waiting longer than 3 seconds for student responses result in increases in:
However, teacher questioning is often viewed as intuitive and something teachers "just know how to do." Often, teachers think of questions on the spot. Planning questions ahead so they enable teachers to gather evidence of students' learning quickly to inform them of the next step, and to enable students to think critically can have more impact on student learning. Here are some strategies and resources for you to use questioning more effectively. Teachers may want to embed a collection of high quality questions into programs and units of work so they are accessible to all teachers and students.
Diagnostic questions are those that identify students' understanding AND reveal their misconceptions. These questions are particularly useful in science and maths. VALID questions are examples of quality diagnostic questions. To design quality diagnostic questions, teachers need to understand how to write multiple choice questions and have a strong knowledge of common misconceptions that their students hold.
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Hinge questions are questions used around the middle of a lesson. They are questions that allow the teacher to determine whether they can move on with their instruction or revisit the concepts they have just covered (for the whole class or for small groups of students). There are four elements of hinge questions:
This video further explains the use of hinge questions as formative assessment.
Hinge questions are challegning and time-consuming to create, but they can be very worthwhile as a formative assessment tool. As Dylan Wiliam notes, "the benefits of doing so are huge. It means that you can find out what’s going wrong with students’ learning when they’re right in front of you ... If you don’t have this opportunity, then you’ll have to wait until you grade their work. And then, long after the students have left the classroom.”
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Both teachers and students can use a range of strategies to create a sequence of questions that range from lower order to higher order, to make students think. Two of these strategies are Bloom's taxonomy and the Weiderhold Question Matrix.
There are lots of resources and articles on using Bloom's taxonomy to make question stems to support both teachers and students in creating questions. Just search for "Blooms question stems" in Google.
The Weiderhold Question Matrix is a less known strategy and is explained in the video above.
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