Asking Questions

Costa's Levels of Questioning

What: Created by Art Costa, founder of The Institute for Habits of Mind, Costa's Levels of Questioning uses the power of inquiry to develop students' ability to ask open-ended questions and develop higher order thinking skills.

Why effective? Moving students through Bloom's Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking, students use critical thinking skills to make meaning out of the text, or what Rosenblatt describes as a "transaction with the text". This active process engages students in considering:

what's in the text;
reading between the lines or drawing conclusions based on text evidence; and
connecting the text to self and the world.

Resources:

Activities - Picture This: Using photographs is an easy entry point to introduce the concept of levels of questioning and to begin practicing asking questions:

"Bad Clementine" - A painting of an unlikely superhero
Comic Scene - A mysterious comic scene
New York Times - What's going on in this picture? - Photos are posted weekly here. Students may apply their inquisitive skills and then reveal the hidden story behind each one.

References

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1988, January). Writing and reading: The transactional theory (Report No. 416). Retrieved from Eric website: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED29206

Writing Higher Order Questions Having students develop better questions, or even higher order questions, allows for a deeper understanding of a subject. Watch as Ms. Francisco uses a variety of strategies to encourage higher order questioning from her students.

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