There is much discussion and research into the kinds of questions that teachers use in lessons to assist learning. Another important dimension to asking questions is to examine the kind of questions or statements that students ask. Encouraging students to ask questions about the world around them is part of stimulating students’ interest in science. Many students already ask a lot of questions, but they often ask them when their parents or you are very busy, so answering them is not always convenient. But if time is not given to students’ questions, there is a risk of stifling their interest in science.
This unit explores the kinds of questions or statements that students ask. It also looks at ways to handle such questions in order to provoke students’ interest and encourage them to ask more productive questions that lead to deeper understanding through investigations.
Encouraging your students to ask questions about all kinds of materials and objects is important to their learning in science. It is a way to stimulate interest and capture attention. Students need to develop their scientific literacy in order to make informed choices about their lifestyle and work. Being able to question science activities and findings is therefore a crucial skill to develop in your students.
Students’ questions give you an insight into the issues and problems that they are trying to understand and may be struggling to make sense of. It is as they raise these questions that they try to link together new ideas or observations with what they already know. It is important, therefore, that you as their teacher pay attention to their questions and handle them effectively. Students’ questions help you to evaluate their learning.
Being able to sort and classify is an important skill for everyone because it allows us to choose and select the best material, object, substance or way of working to do a task effectively. Key to sorting and classifying effectively is being able to raise questions about the objects being sorted to identify similarities and differences. Collections of objects and materials present good starting points for helping students to raise their own questions.
Students ask lots of questions from an early age for a variety of reasons, including wanting to know more about the world around them. Often their questions are raised to help them make links with what they know.
Not all their questions are easy to answer and some do not need answering immediately, but all of them should be respected and taken seriously. This is not always easy when you are very busy or the question seems irrelevant to what you are teaching. However, acknowledging the question and answering it will show students that you value their request and their ideas. This will encourage them to continue to be curious about their surroundings. But to ignore or ridicule their efforts could have detrimental effects on their participation in science and belief in themselves as learners.
Look at this list of questions (adapted from Harlen, 1985) from students:
How would you respond to each of these spontaneous questions? Which of these questions would you find easy to answer? Which would be harder to answer? Why do you think this?
Depending on the types of questions that students ask, there are strategies you can use to help answer the question and maintain students’ interest. Not all questions need to be answered immediately or at all. Not all questions are productive questions to lead to ‘hands on’ science, but nonetheless they need some kind of response; this may be that you do not know the answer and will find out, or you cannot answer because nobody knows the answer.
Some of these questions can be answered very easily, because the students just want the information. Others are not so simple. For example, your response to Question 9 depends on your own beliefs. For Question 5, you cannot say no and you would need to say something like ‘We do not know yet’. The other questions can all be answered, but some are more difficult for younger students, as they do not have enough experience to understand the explanation. With some careful further questioning by you, Question 3 (for example) could be used to start some investigations into aspects of the science involved. These are more productive types of questions as they hint at possible further action or investigations.
You may not even know the answers to some of the questions unless you do some research. Many teachers may fear letting their students raise their own questions in case they cannot answer the question for the students.
Now read Case Study 1.
Mrs Das teaches 57 students in Class III. She is keen to help her students investigate the local environment and science using local resources. She explains how she set up a sorting activity and encouraged her students to ask questions about the objects.
I have always enjoyed doing practical activities with my class. I wanted to help them explore the difference between living and dead things, so I collected together a group of objects from around the classroom and outside. I also included a few pictures that I cut out of magazines of some animals. I prepared two labels (‘Living’ and ‘Not living’) and put these on the table in front of my students [Figure 1].
I worked with two groups of six students while the rest of the class did other tasks. I did this over two lessons with five groups in the first and the same in the second. I gave each pair of students one object and asked them to think what questions they wanted answered about their object. All of them suggested questions like:
All of these were the sort of questions you would expect students of this age to ask. They were more focused on naming them and fitting the simple information into their current understanding and experience.
After they had all done the task I asked them if anyone could answer these questions. They could answer some but not others. Mostly they were able to name the objects, including most of the animal pictures but not as many of the plants and just a few of the other objects. Picking up on their question ‘Is it dead?’, I asked the students if they could sort the objects into living and not living.
All the students participated – even those who are normally very reticent to answer questions in whole-class discussions. I asked questions when the group struggled with its discussion, but otherwise I just listened. I asked one group why they had put a dead leaf into ‘Not living’ and the other group why they had put their dead leaf into ‘Living’. It was clear that they were confused about the leaf and so we discussed if it had ever been alive, and agreed in the end to add it to a new group labelled ‘Once living’.
My students found it easy to decide about a piece of metal but found a piece of cotton cloth difficult to group, as it had once been living and was now made into fabric. The discussion and their questioning helped my students to clarify their thinking about the difference between living and non-living things. Their curiosity was aroused by the interactive task.
Pause for thought How does such an activity help students to be more observant and curious, or ask more productive questions? |
Learning how to handle students’ questions needs you to extend your understanding of the types of questions that students raise and develop your skills in handling these. Table 1 (adapted from Harlen et al., 2003) lists the five key categories of questions that students ask.
Category | Categorisation of children’s question | Children’s question |
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(a) | Questions that are really statements expressed as a questions | Why are birds so clever they can weave nests with their beaks? |
(b) | Questions requiring simple factual answers | Where was the bird’s nest found? |
(c) | Questions requiring more complex answers | Why do some birds nest in trees and some on the ground? |
(d) | Questions that lead to enquiry by the student(s) | What is the nest made of? |
(e) | Philosophical questions | Why are birds made so that they can fly and not other animals? |
Learning to recognise the categories of questions listed in Table 1 takes practice.
A teacher brought some caterpillars on a branch into the classroom to give their students the opportunity to raise questions about what they saw. You could also read the key resource ‘Talk for learning’ before you do the task to extend your understanding of why talking is so important in the classroom to help learning. Relate what you read to your experience of doing this task with a colleague.
Look at the list of questions raised by the students below. Then use the table in Resource 1 to categorise the questions and think how you might handle the question. You may want to do this activity with a colleague because it is often only when you start to talk with someone else that you develop your ideas and thinking about such an issue.
Pause for thought
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Look at a Resources 2 and 3, which summarise the ways to handle each type of question and give possible ways to respond to the questions above. This is to help you become more skilled at answering students’ questions, or rather handling students’ questions. Practice identifying the types of questions and how to handle them by listening to your students and giving them opportunities to raise questions. Students should then be encouraged to investigate the more productive questions themselves by research or practical hands-on activities whenever possible. The video resource below also illustrates how talking and forming their own questions can promote learning.
A first step to helping your students raise questions is to stimulate their interest by giving them direct contact with materials that raise their curiosity. This is not as difficult as it may seem, because students will be interested in many things they have not seen before or in a group of objects that you would not expect to be together. Objects that have a particular meaning for your students might also raise their curiosity and provoke discussion.
The more you do this, the better will be the quality of the questions that your students raise. The first kinds of question that students will ask are ‘Why have you brought them into the class?’ and ‘What are they going to do with them?’
Mrs Pandya, working with Class IV students, is starting work on devising and using criteria to identify the many different species of plants and animals found around the school and in the community.
I decided that the first step I had to take with my students was to develop their understanding of the key features of plants and animals. They could then use this as the basis for looking at the similarities and differences among a collection of living things. In the first lesson I explored with them the common features of animals. To do this, I collected together a lot of pictures of animals found in India that I cut out of magazines and newspapers. I displayed the pictures on the wall, so that everyone could see them, before asking the students to talk with their partners about what questions they could ask about all the animals. My class is used to working in pairs. The pictures I used were of a tiger, elephant, cow, monkey and a horse.
After a few minutes I asked for volunteers to suggest questions, which I recorded on the blackboard. Then I asked them to explore how they can sort the animals using their questions as criteria for classifying them. The questions ranged from things like which animals were the same colour to whether the animals gave birth to live young. Their criteria that arose from their questions included the following similarities: a head, two eyes, a mouth, teeth, nose, nostrils, tails, four legs, body and skin, which I listed on the blackboard.
Next I asked what differences they could see between the animals when they looked at the pictures. The students responded with colour, size, shape, skin and different patterns on their skin as examples. Next we discussed which features were best for sorting the animals into groups and how we have common features. I suggested that we vary among ourselves but that we all belong to the same group (i.e. humans), and therefore have common features. In the next lesson I plan to bring in some more pictures of different types of birds, especially local birds, and ask the students to think what criteria they could use to differentiate such a variety of birds so that they see how much more detailed and closer they have to look when sorting and classifying one group of animals or plants.
I was pleased with how interested my students were in talking about how to group animals and the quality of questions they raised.
Pause for thought How could you do something like this with your students? |
Deciding which questions to answer and which ones to use to lead into investigations is your professional judgement. It is not always possible to do investigations for every question, but giving students the time to raise their own questions pushes them into thinking more deeply about any topic. For that reason alone, it is a worthwhile activity.
Think about the next topic you are teaching your class. Gather together a collection of objects that will provoke their curiosity. Depending on the age of your students and the topic you are studying, these could be some simple toys, a collection of seeds or a collection of different types of leaves.
After the lesson, look more closely at the questions and identify those that could be answered by students from their textbook or other science books, or by investigating their ideas.
Pause for thought
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Video: Using questioning to promote thinking |
Watching the video will help consolidate some of the ideas you have met in this unit.
Now read Case Study 3.
Mr Kumar was working on developing his Class VIII’s knowledge about plants by exploring ways to classify them, and wanted to stimulate his students’ curiosity. He explains what he did to start the topic.
I gathered together a collection of leaves from local trees and put these on the table at the side in the classroom. I did not name them, but numbered them from one to ten and put up a notice that asked my students to look at the leaves and to think what sort of questions they would like to ask about them. I left a pen and some small pieces of paper beside a box labelled ‘Questions’. Students did not have to put their name on their piece of paper.
I was not sure if I would get any questions, but several students noticed the display as they came in and I saw them looking and talking about the leaves. Some tried to identify them and others were thinking about questions. At the end of the week I found seven questions in the box. This pleased me, especially as they were good questions, such as:
I told the class that I would be using some of their questions in the next lesson. I planned to think about which questions could be used for investigations that the students could do. My first thoughts were to look at ways of sorting and classifying leaves by their shape. I prepared a sheet [see Resource 5] to help students think about the criteria and questions that they could use to sort them.
Pause for thought
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By providing contexts for students to raise purposeful and productive questions, you are encouraging them to be more curious and observant about the world around them. Arousing curiosity is an important part of science education, because it encourages interest in what things are and why they do what they do. Students want to know and understand. Such experiences can affect how your students respond to their environment and develop empathy for their world.
Think how you could stimulate your students’ curiosity in your next topic. What small change could you make in your classroom that would raise their interest and ask questions? For example, could you do any of the following?
Think how you will respond to their questions. Remember that you do not have to answer all the questions immediately and you may want to look again at Resource 2, which shows you how you could respond to the different categories of questions.
Pause for thought
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A topic like plants is not always seen as exciting by most students. But by doing more practical, hands-on activities – such as encouraging the students to handle pictures and objects, talk about their various features, and raise questions about their structure, shape and colour – they are much more likely to be interested and remember. So using both your own questioning skills to stimulate interest and encouraging your students to raise questions will bring science to life – see Resource 6, ‘Using questioning to promote thinking’.
Just telling your students ‘This is a mango leaf’ and giving the correct biological name will not necessarily help them retain the information, as there is no context. Allowing them to raise their own questions and using these as the starting point will give them much more ownership of the topic. More productive questions that your students raise can then lead to research or investigations, which also stimulates their interest.
This unit has explored how to help students raise their own questions, and how this encourages positive attitudes to science and works towards developing a questioning and critical mind. Such activities lead to investigative work, which helps students to think more deeply about the topic and supports them in adjusting their understanding towards currently accepted ideas.
Working in a more interactive way brings many rewards, both for you and the students. For you as a teacher, being more involved in the lesson in an active and enthusiastic way, exploring with your students their ideas and trying to extend their thinking, is more rewarding. Through stimulating their questioning skills, you provide yourself with much more insight into what they already know, and you can be more proactive in supporting their learning. Being respected by you and being asked their ideas mean that students will become more confident and interested in their work, which will raise their achievement.
This table is to be used with Activity 2.
Question | Category | How to handle the question |
---|---|---|
1 | ||
2 | ||
3 | ||
4 | ||
5 | ||
6 | ||
7 | ||
8 | ||
9 | ||
10 |
Question | Category | How to handle the question |
---|---|---|
1. Why are they called caterpillars? | (b) or maybe (e) | ‘It’s the name given to this stage of their growth before they become a butterfly, but I don’t know why it has this name.’ |
2. Are they worms? | (b) | ‘No, although they look like worms in some ways.’ |
3. What do they eat? | (d) | ‘That’s something you could find out or even see as we keep them in the classroom for the lesson. Can you suggest how we can do this?’ |
4. Can they see me? | (d) | ‘We could try to find out. How would you do that?’ |
5. Will they turn into butterflies? | (b) and (d) | ‘Yes. If we keep them in the right way, you will see that for yourself.’ |
6. What do they feel like? | (b) but perhaps (a) | ‘It’s best not to touch them, as some of their hairs may irritate your skin. They look very soft. What do you think they feel like?’ |
7. How does it change into a pupa? | (c) | ‘They form a shell and then inside that they slowly change. But what happens inside is something you could find out later in your science classes.’ |
8. How old are they? | (b) or (d) | If known tell the students when they hatched; if not, they could look up how long they stay as caterpillars. |
9. Why are they so wiggly? | (a) | ‘They’re always moving, aren’t they?’ |
10. Why do some things turn into something else, like a tadpole into a frog? | (e) or maybe (c) | If this question is categorised as (e), this isn’t something we know or can find. |
Groupwork is a systematic, active, pedagogical strategy that encourages small groups of students to work together for the achievement of a common goal. These small groups promote more active and more effective learning through structured activities.
Groupwork can be a very effective way of motivating your students to learn by encouraging them to think, communicate, exchange ideas and thoughts, and make decisions. Your students can both teach and learn from others: a powerful and active form of learning.
Groupwork is more than students sitting in groups; it involves working on and contributing to a shared learning task with a clear objective. You need to be clear about why you are using groupwork for learning and know why this is preferable to lecturing, pair work or to students working on their own. Thus groupwork has to be well-planned and purposeful.
When and how you use groupwork will depend on what learning you want to achieve by the end of the lesson. You can include groupwork at the start, the end or midway through the lesson, but you will need to allow enough time. You will need to think about the task that you want your students to complete and the best way to organise the groups.
As a teacher, you can ensure that groupwork is successful if you plan in advance:
The task that you ask your students to complete depends on what you what them to learn. By taking part in groupwork, they will learn skills such as listening to each other, explaining their ideas and working cooperatively. However, the main aim is for them to learn something about the subject that you are teaching. Some examples of tasks could include the following:
Groups of four to eight are ideal but this will depend on the size of your class, the physical environment and furniture, and the attainment and age range of your class. Ideally everyone in a group needs to see each other, talk without shouting and contribute to the group’s outcome.
You can set up routines and rules to manage good groupwork. When you use groupwork regularly, students will know what you expect and find it enjoyable. Initially it is a good idea to work with your class to identify the benefits of working together in teams and groups. You should discuss what makes good groupwork behaviour and possibly generate a list of ‘rules’ that might be displayed; for example, ‘Respect for each other’, ‘Listening’, ‘Helping each other’, ‘Trying more than one idea’, etc.
It is important to give clear verbal instructions about the groupwork that can also be written on the blackboard for reference. You need to:
During the lesson, move around to observe and check how the groups are doing. Offer advice where needed if they are deviating from the task or getting stuck.
You might want to change the groups during the task. Here are two techniques to try when you are feeling confident about groupwork – they are particularly helpful when managing a large class:
At the end of the task, summarise what has been learnt and correct any misunderstandings that you have seen. You may want to hear feedback from each group, or ask just one or two groups who you think have some good ideas. Keep students’ reporting brief and encourage them to offer feedback on work from other groups by identifying what has been done well, what was interesting and what might be developed further.
Even if you want to adopt groupwork in your classroom, you may at times find it difficult to organise because some students:
To become effective at managing groupwork it is important to reflect on all the above points, in addition to considering how far the learning outcomes were met and how well your students responded (did they all benefit?). Consider and carefully plan any adjustments you might make to the group task, resources, timings or composition of the groups.
Research suggests that learning in groups need not be used all the time to have positive effects on student achievement, so you should not feel obliged to use it in every lesson. You might want to consider using groupwork as a supplemental technique, for example as a break between a topic change or a jump-start for class discussion. It can also be used as an ice-breaker or to introduce experiential learning activities and problem solving exercises into the classroom, or to review topics.
Teachers question their students all the time; questions mean that teachers can help their students to learn, and learn more. On average, a teacher spends one-third of their time questioning students in one study (Hastings, 2003). Of the questions posed, 60 per cent recalled facts and 20 per cent were procedural (Hattie, 2012), with most answers being either right or wrong. But does simply asking questions that are either right or wrong promote learning?
There are many different types of questions that students can be asked. The responses and outcomes that the teacher wants dictates the type of question that the teacher should utilise. Teachers generally ask students questions in order to:
Questioning is generally used to find out what students know, so it is important in assessing their progress. Questions can also be used to inspire, extend students’ thinking skills and develop enquiring minds. They can be divided into two broad categories:
Open-ended questions encourage students to think beyond textbook-based, literal answers, thus eliciting a range of responses. They also help the teacher to assess the students’ understanding of content.
Many teachers allow less than one second before requiring a response to a question and therefore often answer the question themselves or rephrase the question (Hastings, 2003). The students only have time to react – they do not have time to think! If you wait for a few seconds before expecting answers, the students will have time to think. This has a positive effect on students’ achievement. By waiting after posing a question, there is an increase in:
The more positively you receive all answers that are given, the more students will continue to think and try. There are many ways to ensure that wrong answers and misconceptions are corrected, and if one student has the wrong idea, you can be sure that many more have as well. You could try the following:
Value all responses by listening carefully and asking the student to explain further. If you ask for further explanation for all answers, right or wrong, students will often correct any mistakes for themselves, you will develop a thinking classroom and you will really knowwhat learning your students have done and how to proceed. If wrong answers result in humiliation or punishment, then your students will stop trying for fear of further embarrassment or ridicule.
It is important that you try to adopt a sequence of questioning that doesn’t end with the right answer. Right answers should be rewarded with follow-up questions that extend the knowledge and provide students with an opportunity to engage with the teacher. You can do this by asking for:
Helping students to think more deeply about (and therefore improve the quality of) their answer is a crucial part of your role. The following skills will help students achieve more:
As a teacher, you need to ask questions that inspire and challenge if you are to generate interesting and inventive answers from your students. You need to give them time to think and you will be amazed how much your students know and how well you can help them progress their learning.
Remember, questioning is not about what the teacher knows, but about what the students know. It is important to remember that you should never answer your own questions! After all, if the students know you will give them the answers after a few seconds of silence, what is their incentive to answer?
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated below, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3.0/). The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence for this project, and not subject to the Creative Commons Licence. This means that this material may only be used unadapted within the TESS-India project and not in any subsequent OER versions. This includes the use of the TESS-India, OU and UKAID logos.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce the material in this unit:
Activity 1: adapted from Harlen, W. (1985) Taking the Plunge. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Figure R2.1: Harlen, W. (1992) The Teaching of Science. London: David Fulton Publisher.
Table R3.1: adapted from Harlen, W., Macro, C., Reed, K. and Schilling, M. (2003) Making Progress in Primary Science. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Figure R5.1: Nix, S. (undated) ‘Parts of a tree, use these tree parts to identify a tree’ in http://forestry.about.com/od/treephysiology/ss/part_of_tree_2.htm.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Video (including video stills): thanks are extended to the teacher educators, headteachers, teachers and students across India who worked with The Open University in the productions.