TI-AIE: Teacher’s questioning: forces

What this unit is about

Many teachers ask a lot of questions during their lessons in school. But how many of these contribute significantly to students’ thinking? In fact, teachers often spend more than half their time in class asking questions. Many questions only require one-word answers and students are given very little time to answer, so many are not enthusiastic about being involved in the lesson.

However, there is a variety of ways that questions could be used and formed more effectively in the classroom to stimulate students’ thinking and participation. This unit focuses on identifying the most productive types of questions that teachers can use to promote students’ thinking and extend their learning. It also gives you the opportunity to try some of these techniques and skills in your own lessons. Through activities investigating forces and their properties, you will discover how questions can help students to build a deeper understanding. The skills of questioning can also be transferred across all science topics and across other subjects to enhance learning.

What you can learn in this unit

• The different types of questions you can use to stimulate students’ thinking and learning.
• New ways and skills in using more open questioning techniques in practical science lessons to extend students’ understanding.

Why this approach is important

As a teacher, being able to ask pertinent and challenging questions is an important skill to learn, because it stimulates students’ thinking and their responses provide you with a range of useful information and insights into their knowledge and current ideas. Figure 1 highlights the key advantages of asking purposeful questions.

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Figure 1 Key advantages of asking purposeful questions.

Asking good questions in a planned and purposeful way will make a significant difference to the students’ achievement. Questions can be used to give students feedback about their ideas, their understanding and their progress. Most students welcome such information, especially if it is given in a positive and constructive way. It helps them to measure their progress and gives them confidence.

The important thing to do when planning a lesson is to be clear about the kind of questions that you could use to help you achieve the intended learning outcomes. Developing students’ scientific understanding about forces and how they affect the movement of objects in different ways is not an easy task.

1 Questioning and thinking

One of the important factors in helping the students link theory and their own experience together and so develop a deeper understanding about forces is to ask questions that they can investigate and hopefully solve. To do this, you need to be able use your questioning skills in creative and dynamic ways so that students are encouraged to think.

Case Study 1: Two teachers and forces

Mrs Nair is questioning her class about what she is doing. Here, she describes what she did.

At the start of my lesson I asked the students to watch me push a book across my desk and asked the class, ‘What am I doing?’ One of the class replied, ‘Pushing the book.’

‘Good,’ I say, ‘and that is what a force is. Say after me, “A force is a push.”’ The class said what I asked, and I asked them to say it again. I asked again what a force was, and they repeated it over and over until I thought they knew it.

Next, I pulled the book across my desk towards myself and ask the pupils, ‘What am I doing?’ They replied that I was pulling the book and I said that that was correct. I next asked them to repeat, ‘A pull is a force.’ I tell them to repeat the statement several times before we return to the textbook and the next section.

Mrs Sharma is working with her class on forces. She explains how she started her lesson and then continued it.

First I asked my class, in their groups, to list as many things as they could think of that move. As they wrote, I went round and gave each group a set of objects – a mixture of all kinds of things, from a stone to a picture of a rickshaw bike [Figure 2] taken from the newspaper. The collection included small and large, heavy and light objects.

Figure 2 A rickshaw: an example of an object that moves.

I then asked them the question, ‘How can you make these objects move?’ I gave them several minutes to discuss and try out some of their ideas before asking each group to list their responses on a sheet of paper for all to see. They displayed these on the wall and together the students and I picked out the common ideas and words or terms they had used, such as ‘push’, ‘pull’, ‘lift’, ‘drop’, ‘strong’, ‘weak’, ‘gentle’, ‘friction’, ‘heavy’, ‘light’ and ‘movement’. Next I asked them, ‘Can you write a sentence or two to describe what you think causes things to move?’

Pause for thought Which of these two teachers do you think is encouraging their students to think more deeply and develop their understanding about movement and forces most? How is that teacher doing this? What teaching strategies is she using? How is her teaching and use of questions different from the other?

It is easy to see that the second teacher, Mrs Sharma, is helping her students explore their own ideas in a more practical way by asking them higher-order types of questions, as well as also asking them to share their ideas with each other. The students in the first lesson are not being challenged intellectually as much as those in the second.

Mrs Sharma is giving them time to respond to the questions and follows up some of their questions with probing supplementary questions. By being able to feel the difference between the force that is needed to push, say, a brick across the mat on the floor of the classroom, and how much easier it is to push a smooth round stone or ball across the same surface, the students will be able to build up ideas in their head that fit in with what they have felt happening. It helps them to relate theory with their observations better.

As a teacher, your role is to help your students gradually build up their understanding of the science of forces. To do this, you need to probe their ideas. Activity 1 asks you to think about the kind of questions that you use in your classroom and explore ways of extending your skills.

Video: Using questioning to promote thinking

2 Ways of handling questions

When you ask a question, do all the students think about the question? How do you know? How can you encourage all the students to participate more?

Research shows that many teachers only allow one second for students to think before calling for an answer. Do you give students time to think about their answers? Teachers also often ask the same students to answer questions, because they have their hands up first and the lesson can move on. But by just waiting a few seconds longer before asking someone to answer, you will see an increase in:

• the length of pupil responses
• the number of pupils offering responses
• the frequency of pupil questions
• the number of responses from less capable pupils
• positive interactions between pupils.

The next activity asks you to try some of these techniques in your next lesson to see if this happens to you.

Pause for thought Most of your students may not have been aware of the subtle changes you made, but what effect did it have? How well did you manage the questioning? Were you able to pause and let them think longer? How did it affect their participation? Who participated, responded or had greater involvement in the lesson? How do you know this? What did they say or do that made you think the students were more interested?

Extending your students’ thinking

Helping students to think more deeply and improve the quality of their answers is a crucial part of your role. Extending your questioning by using hints and/or supplementary questions, as suggested above, will draw in those more reluctant learners. You could also ask more questions when a student gives a correct answer, and ask them what would happen if they pushed on a different part of the log to get them to suggest what might happen. To help you develop and extend your questioning skills, read Resource 1, ‘Using questioning to promote thinking’ – especially the section on ‘Improving quality of responses’, because this suggests different ways to explore students’ ideas by employing different strategies.

Another way to raise students’ participation is to give time to sequencing your questions so that they are progressive and extend thinking. If necessary, probe their answers further to ensure that they really do understand and can link it to other situations.

Listening to students

To be able to do any of the above, you need to listen carefully to what students say and give them time to express themselves. Students will only feel confident enough to offer answers if you are sensitive to each student as they speak.

Linked to this building of confidence is the necessity of sensitive handling of wrong or muddled answers. The way that incorrect responses are handled will determine whether pupils continue to respond to the teacher’s questions. ‘That’s wrong’, ‘You are stupid’ or ‘No’, or other humiliation or punishment, often stops pupils volunteering any more answers from fear of further embarrassment or ridicule. Instead, if you can pick out parts of the answers that are correct and ask them in a supportive way to think a bit more about their answer, you may encourage more active participation (Figure 3). This helps your students to learn from their mistakes in a way that negative behaviour towards them does not.

Figure 3 A teacher listening to students as they work.

So listening enables you not just to look for the answer you are expecting, but alerts you to unusual or innovative answers that you may not have expected. Such answers could highlight misconceptions or misunderstandings that need correcting, or they may show a new approach that you had not considered. Your response to these – for example, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Tell me more why you think that way’ – could be very important in maintaining motivation.

3 Using open-ended activities

As students work on activities and push and pull objects along, they are building up their own vocabulary of words to describe what they experience. By using different kinds of questions – particularly more open-ended questions – you will give the students time and space to think and share their ideas with their peers.

Together they are constructing understanding based on their individual experiences and shared knowledge. Some of their ideas may not be well-formed, but by working with others to solve problems posed by open-ended questions, they are able to discuss their ideas and think about what they thought they knew and how accurate that was. Together they can begin to adjust their ideas to fit the accepted science about what a force is and what forces do.

The case study below shows how one teacher uses open-ended questions to explore what her students know about forces.

Pause for thought Mrs Das’s lesson used very simple materials and took little preparation. You may not be able to do a ‘circus’ of activities, but think how you could make use of more open-ended activities in your science lessons. If you have a large class, maybe you could do the practical in two halves, with one half doing their own work from their textbook while you work with the others; then you swap over next lesson. Another way to help students do the same activity of answering the open-ended questions is to collect some pictures from newspapers, like the photo Mrs Sharma used to enable the groups to talk about their ideas.

To help students understand the theoretical ideas about forces more deeply, it is important that they have experiences that allow them to feel the force as it impacts on objects and to think about what is happening. Your use of challenging questions will help them think more deeply.

Pause for thought The following questions may help you think over what happened: What did not go quite as you expected or would have liked? Why not? How can you make this better next time? How well did you do asking more open-ended questions? Did it encourage the students to think more? Were the students more motivated and involved in the lesson, and if so, how?

Students’ learning naturally loops through a cycle of wonder, exploration, discovery, reflection and more wonder, especially when they are given opportunities to explore practically and talk about their ideas about such a topic as forces. Such activity leads them on to increasingly complex knowledge and sophisticated thinking. The power of open-ended questions comes from the way these questions tap into the natural curiosity, inviting students to pursue how the world works. Resource 2, ‘Talk for learning’ – particularly the sections labelled ‘Why talk for learning is important’ and ‘Planning talk for learning activities in the classroom’ – will help you to understand better the importance of talk for thinking.

Video: Talk for learning

Using open-ended questions shows students that their teachers respect them and trust them to have good ideas, think for themselves and contribute in valuable ways. The resulting sense of autonomy, belonging and competence gives them confidence as learners.

4 Summary

Teaching about forces in a more interactive way helps students to engage more deeply in the ideas behind the science. Using more open-ended questions makes lessons more interactive, especially when students work in pairs or groups to answer questions. This increases the participation of all students and supports deeper learning. Developing your skills in formulating and using questions, especially more open-ended questions, is crucial across all science topics.

Open-ended questions support academic and social learning, and encourage children’s natural curiosity, challenging them to think for themselves. The result is learners who are motivated and whose responses enlighten their classmates and their teacher.

Open-ended questions usually begin with phrases like ‘What happens if …?’, ‘What do you think will happen?’ or ‘Why do you say that?’ Simple ideas, such as giving students a little more time to think before answering your question, will result in better answers and greater thought by your students.

Resources

Resource 1: Using questioning to promote thinking

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:

• guide students toward understanding when a new topic or material is introduced
• push students to do a greater share of their thinking
• remediate an error
• stretch students
• check for understanding.

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:

• Lower-order questions, which involve the recall of facts and knowledge previously taught, often involving closed questions (a yes or no answer).
• Higher-order questions, which require more thinking. They may ask the students to put together information previously learnt to form an answer or to support an argument in a logical manner. Higher-order questions are often more open-ended.

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.

Resource 2: Talk for learning

Resource 3: Common mistakes in questioning

It is often said that ‘questions are only as good as the answers they get’. If you are asking your students questions, you do not want to discourage them from offering answers or participating. Common errors in questioning are:

• asking too many questions at once
• asking a question and answering it yourself
• asking a difficult question too early
• always asking the same type of question
• asking a question in a threatening way
• not using probing questions
• not giving students enough time to think
• ignoring answers
• not correcting wrong answers
• failing to see the implications of answers
• failing to build on answers.

If you do any of these, think about how you might adapt your approach and find ways of doing the opposite. Watch and see the improvement in students’ performance.

Additional resources

• Video about forces: http://archive.teachfind.com/ ttv/ www.teachers.tv/ videos/ primary-science-forces-pushes-pulls-and-friction.html
• Activities about students asking questions: http://www.primas-project.eu/ servlet/ supportBinaryFiles?referenceId=2&supportId=1362

References

Acknowledgements

This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3.0/), unless identified otherwise. The licence excludes the use of the TESS-India, OU and UKAID logos, which may only be used unadapted within the TESS-India project.

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.