Follow Us on Google
Teachers’ questions are instructional cues or stimuli that convey to students the content elements to be learned and directions for what they are to do and how they are to do it. Teachers ask questions to develop interest and motivate students to become actively involved in the lessons; to evaluate students’ preparation and check on homework or seatwork completion; to develop critical thinking skills and inquiring attitudes; to review and summarise previous lessons; to nurture insights by exposing new relationships; to assess achievement of instructional goals and objectives; and to stimulate students to pursue knowledge on their own. To help students achieve these laudable feats, students must go through four steps: attending to the question; deciphering the meaning of the question; generating a covert response (i.e. formulating a response in one’s mind); and often revising the response (based on teacher probing or other feedback).
Last week, I shared one framework for questioning. Another framework to be considered this week is Bloom’s taxonomy, developed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom with some collaborators, and was later revised 2001 by Anderson and Krathwohl. There are six levels in the taxonomy – remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, and create. Questions can be asked at each of these levels. At the ‘remember’ level, a teacher asks questions that help the learner to recall facts and basic concepts. Key words used to guarantee remembering the concepts taught are ‘define’, ‘duplicate’, ‘list’, ‘memorise’, ‘repeat’, and ‘state’. The second lower level is ‘understand’. Here, learners are prompted to explain ideas or concepts. Key words used by a teacher to test at this level include ‘classify’, ‘describe’, discuss’, ‘explain’, ‘identify’, ‘locate’, ‘recognise’, ‘report’, ‘select’, and ‘translate’. At the ‘apply’ level, a teacher wants the learner to use information in new situations. To do so, learners are asked to ‘execute’, ‘implement’, ‘solve’, ‘use’, ‘demonstrate’, ‘interpret’, ‘operate’, ‘schedule’, and ‘sketch’. You can tell that this level moves away gradually from the lower level of thinking. The next level, ‘analyse’, gets the learner to draw connections among ideas. The learner is asked to ‘differentiate’, ‘organise’, ‘relate’, ‘compare’, ‘contrast’, ‘distinguish’, ‘examine’, ‘experiment’, ‘question’, and ‘test’. At the ‘evaluate’ level, learners endeavour to justify a stand or decision. They ‘appraise’, ‘argue’, ‘defend’, ‘judge’, ‘select’, ‘support’, ‘value’, ‘critique’, and ‘weigh’. The topmost higher order level requires students to ‘create’. Here, they are expected to produce new or original work. They ‘design’, ‘assemble’, ‘construct’, ‘conjecture’, ‘develop’, ‘formulate’, ‘author’, and ‘investigate’.
As a teacher, do you strive to go beyond the lower level of recognising and recalling information? There should be fewer questions in this domain by teachers to students. The point is that a skilled teacher must endeavour to use questions from all the levels so that students can perform optimally. It is true that the level of students will matter. Yet, if thought through well ahead of time, a teacher could craft questions that would invoke critical thinking abilities in the students.
True, some teachers do not know how to go about crafting questions that reflect these levels in their teaching. There are strategies, however, that can help teachers succeed in doing so. One is to simply use the key words identified above for each of the levels and formulate questions with them. For example, a teacher could want to ask for more evidence from her students. Instead of simply accepting a one-off response, the teacher could ask, ‘How do you know that?’ or ‘What is the source of that information?’ These additional questions force the learner to think broadly and synthesise their response with what has been mentioned. Questions that ask for clarification, such as ‘Can you put that in another way?’, ‘What do you mean by that?’, ‘Why do you say that?’, and ‘Do you mean that …?’ can help a teacher to encourage the students to think deeper. Obviously, the use of critical thinking in formulating engaging questions for learners cannot be overemphasised.
Interestingly, Bloom’s Taxonomy can be pursued with the tenets of critical thinking. All six levels can attempt questions that engage critical thinking. Can you guess how that works? Don’t guess too hard! Let’s take it together. At the ‘knowledge’ level – where identification and recall of information is domiciled – the who, what, where, when, and how questions are used. For example, a learner may be asked, ‘What is the meaning of a clause?’ At the comprehension level – where learners are expected to organise and select facts and ideas – they could be asked to retell a concept in their own words; asked to write a brief outline; asked the main idea of a concept; or asked what differences exist between two concepts. The third level – application – gets them to use facts, rules, and principles. To illustrate, they could be asked how A is an example of B. Or how B is related to C. Or why a concept is significant. At the analysis level, they are expected to separate a whole into component parts. To do this, they should be able to explain the parts or features of a concept, classify A according to B, show how A compares/contrasts with B, or present evidence for a concept. Also, at the synthesis level, they are to combine ideas to form a new whole. They could be asked to predict or infer from a concept what is to happen next; add ideas to a concept established; proffer solutions for a problem; suggest how to create/design something; or tell what might happen if they combined A and B. And at the last stage of evaluation – where they are trained to develop opinions, judgments, or decisions – they are expected to appraise, compare, decide, judge, justify, prioritise, rank, give their opinion, etc. They could be asked to give the criteria they would use to assess a thing; tell what is most important and the reason for the position; prioritise A according to B; or explain why they agree/disagree with a line of thought.
The last article on this series will focus on additional strategies that can help teachers ask questions from a lower order to a higher order, from the known to the unknown, so that their students would always participate and communicate effectively in their classes.
