Questioning in the Secondary School

Dr George A Brown, Prof E C Wragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415249522
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134534623
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The ability to ask intelligent and searching questions, to use questioning for different purposes and to know what to do with the answers is crucial to teachers of all subjects and age groups. Sometimes a whole lesson can be built around one or two key questions.

Ted Wragg and George Brown explore the wide range of questions that teachers can ask, from those requiring simple recall of information right up to those that stimulate complex reasoning, imagination and speculation. The book explores the various strategies open to teachers and, through a combination of activities and discussion points, helps them to:

* reflect upon their use of questions
* develop their approaches to preparing, using and evaluating questions
* explore ways to encourage pupils to ask questions.

This book is one of a set of eight innovative yet practical resource books for teachers, focussing on the classroom and covering vital skills for primary and secondary teachers. The books are strongly influenced by the findings of numerous research projects during which hundreds of teachers were observed at work. The first editions of the series were bestsellers and these revised second editions will be equally welcomed by teachers eager to improve their teaching skills.

Unit 1 Why do we ask questions?

A 5-year-old girl returned from her first day at school and announced that her teacher was no good because she didn’t know anything. When asked why she thought this, she replied that ‘the teacher just kept on asking us things’. The implication behind her remark was that we normally ask questions when we really want to know something and, if you already know the answer, then you don’t need to ask.

So why do teachers, and, for that matter, parents as well, ask children so many questions as part of the younger generation’s induction into the knowledge, skills, values and culture of their forebears? Why do they not simply tell them all they need to know? Surely that would save a great deal of time.

As a preliminary to reading this unit, try tackling one or more of the following questions about questions.

Activity 1

Write down your answers to, or think about, the following three questions. In each case try to imagine one or two questions that people are likely to ask in the

circumstances described.

1. ‘Why do people generally ask each other questions in daily conversation?’
2. ‘Why do teachers ask questions in their lessons?’
3. ‘Why do pupils ask questions in class, of one another, or of the teacher?’

Discuss your responses with fellow teachers or students, if you are a member of a group.

If you look at the answers and hypothetical questions you have thought of in the first category in Activity 1, people in general, you will see many different reasons lying beneath them. Some cover knowledge that a person might need in some aspect of daily life (‘How do you mend a puncture?’). Others might be related to personal feelings and emotions (‘Why are you upset?). There are also social reasons for asking questions in conversations (‘How are you?’). We seek information or the solution to problems; we want to satisfy our curiosity or allay anxiety; we want to make contact with, or deepen our understanding of another person. There are numerous other reasons. Dillon (1994) is one of several writers who have explored the use of questions to stimulate thinking and discussion in classrooms.

Why do teachers ask questions?

WHY DO TEACHERS ASK QUESTIONS?

Teachers’ reasons for asking questions of their pupils in classrooms are often rather different from those in everyday conversation. Put another way, the rules of talk in the classroom are different from those in other contexts. We often ask questions of children, not to obtain new knowledge for ourselves but to find out what children already know. This principle is stressed by Ausubel (1978):

The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him/her accordingly.

Other reasons for asking questions are to stimulate recall, to deepen understanding, to develop imagination and to encourage problem solving. There are also questions to do with class management, such as, ‘Have you got your books?’. Turney et al. (1973), in their first edition of the Sydney Micro Series, list twelve possible functions of questions (see below).

Why do we ask questions?

To arouse interest and curiosity concerning a topic.

To focus attention on a particular issue or concept.

To develop an active approach to learning.

To stimulate pupils to ask questions of themselves and others.

To structure a task in such a way that learning will be maximised.

To diagnose specific difficulties inhibiting pupil learning.

To communicate to the group that involvement in the lesson is expected, and that overt participation by all members of the group is valued.

To provide an opportunity for pupils to assimilate and reflect upon information.

To involve pupils in using an inferred cognitive operation on the assumption that this will assist in developing thinking skills.

To develop reflection and comment by pupils on the responses of other members of the group, both pupils and teachers.

To afford an opportunity for pupils to learn vicariously through discussion.

Some reasons for asking questions

Source: Turney et al. (1973)

Turney’s list is rather more comprehensive than that of most young teachers who are, for the first time, considering the way they ask questions of pupils. For example, in a study of 190 teachers in US elementary schools (primary schools), Pate and Bremer (1967) asked teachers to provide reasons for asking questions.

They found that the most common category was ‘questions to check knowledge and understanding’, followed by ‘diagnosing pupils’ difficulties’ and ‘recall of facts’. Only 10 per cent stressed the use of questions to encourage pupils to think. Significantly, there were no responses suggesting that questions may be used to help pupils to learn from each other, or that questions may be used to encourage pupils themselves to ask questions. Yet when teaching is discussed amongst professional people, encouraging pupils to talk and think is often stated as a high priority.

WHY DO TEACHERS ASK SPECIFIC QUESTIONS?

As well as thinking to oneself, ‘Why do I ask questions in teaching?’ it is also instructive to reflect on why a specific question is being asked, and indeed, why this specific question is being put to a particular individual or group. In one of our research projects we studied the reasons given by forty teachers (Brown and Edmondson, 1989). The results are shown below. In effect, the system is a summary of the reasons given by the teachers; it is not a set of mutually exclusive categories. The most common reasons were: encouraging thought, checking understanding, gaining attention, revision and management.

Encouraging thought, understanding of ideas, phenomena, procedures and values	33
Checking understanding, knowledge and skills	30
Gaining attention to task, to enable teacher to move towards teaching point in the hope of eliciting a specific and obscure point, as a warm-up activity for pupils	28
Review, revision, recall, reinforcement of recently learned point, reminder of earlier procedures	23
Management, settling down, to stop calling out by pupils, to direct attention to teacher or text, to warn of precautions	20
Specifically to teach whole class through pupil answers	10
To give everyone a chance to answer	10
Ask bright pupils to encourage others	4
To draw in shyer pupils	4
Probe children’s knowledge after critical answers, redirect question to pupils who asked or to other pupils	3
To allow expressions of feelings, views and empathy	3

Reasons for asking specific questions (percentages of responses in each category)

The teachers who provided samples of questions they asked high-ability pupils cited ‘gaining attention’ and ‘understanding’ as their most frequent reason. Teachers of medium-ability classes reported more ‘checking’ and ‘revision’ questions, whereas teachers of low-ability groups tended to stress ‘understanding’ and ‘management’. Teachers of mixed-ability classes favoured a wider range: ‘understanding’, ‘gaining attention to move towards teaching point’, ‘management’ and ‘revision’.

There were differences between teachers of different subjects. Among the secondary English teachers in the sample, the most common reasons given were to gain attention and for management purposes, whereas the mathematics and science teachers gave priority to checking understanding and encouraging thought. Expressive arts and foreign language teachers gave more revision and checking reasons, whereas history and geography teachers provided more encouraging understanding and gaining attention reasons. The evidence suggests that the context is very important. Teachers’ reasons for asking questions, not surprisingly, vary according to the subject or topic being taught, the class and the ability of the pupils.

In one of our research studies of questions asked by teachers in primary schools (Wragg, 1993), we asked them to identify three key questions and to discuss why they had chosen them. The questions that the teachers judged most successful very often provided a reason that contained a sense of looking ahead – the intention behind the question was evident. The least successful questions seemed to be looking nowhere, or were focused almost entirely upon what the children knew already. Perhaps most importantly of all, in the successful lessons, the key questions were related to the expressed aims of the lesson.

Another of our studies (Wragg, 1993) involved recording more than a thousand questions asked by primary teachers. The questions asked were divided into three categories: managerial if they were to do with the running of the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• AIMS AND CONTENT
• UNIT 1: WHY DO WE ASK QUESTIONS?
• UNIT 2: WHAT KINDS OF QUESTIONS DO WE ASK?
• UNIT 3: WHAT ARE THE TACTICS OF EFFECTIVE QUESTIONING?
• UNIT 4: WHAT KINDS OF LESSONS DO YOU TEACH?
• UNIT 5: HOW DO YOUR PUPILS LEARN?
• UNIT 6: ARE YOU ‘PREPARED’ TO ASK QUESTIONS?
• REFERENCES