Questioning

What is questioning?

The art of asking questions is at the heart of effective communication and information exchange, which underpins good teaching. If you use questioning well, you can improve the student learning experience in a whole range of teaching settings.

Socrates believed that to teach well, an educator must reach into a student's prior knowledge and awareness to help the student reach new levels of thinking. You can use questions to draw from and build on students' prior knowledge and experience to help them to develop deeper understanding of a topic (Paul & Elder, 2019).

Why use questioning?

Through thoughtful questioning, teachers can not only extract factual information, but help learners:

• connect concepts
• make inferences
• think creatively and imaginatively
• think critically
• explore deeper levels of knowing, thinking and understanding.

Developing good questioning skills is particularly important if you use Case Studies in your teaching.

Common issues with questioning

The challenges with questioning are similar to those with Discussions:

• getting students to talk, and keeping the discussion moving
• pointless or off-topic arguments.

Sometimes lecturers tend to overuse particular types of questions; for example, only factual or only divergent questions (see question types in Table 1 below). This can hinder the development of a good debate, or stop students moving through discussion towards a conclusion.

Effective questioning: how do I achieve it?

• Use a variety of question types.
• Hone your questioning skills by practising asking different types of questions.
• Monitor your teaching so that you include varied levels of questioning.

Table 1: Types of questions

There are five basic types of questions: factual, convergent, divergent, evaluative and combination.

Tips and techniques

• Plan key questions to provide structure and direction to the lesson. Spontaneous questions that emerge are fine, but make sure to plan the overall direction of the discussion.
• Phrase the questions clearly and specifically. Avoid vague and ambiguous questions.
• Adapt questions to the level of the students' abilities.
• Ask questions logically and sequentially.
• Ask questions at various cognitive levels.
• Follow up on students' responses.
• Elicit longer, more meaningful and more frequent responses from students after an initial response by:
  • maintaining a deliberate silence
  • making a declarative statement
  • making a reflective statement giving a sense of what the students said
  • declaring perplexity over the response
  • inviting elaboration
  • encouraging other students to comment.
• Give students time to think (wait time) after you ask a question.
• Use divergent questions, which are most likely to produce a range of responses.