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Questioning Techniques
(Used by permission: Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Classroom Activities for Active Learning)

Since most of us use some variation of the lecture method, perhaps the easiest way to begin involving students in class is to plan for ways they can respond actively to the lecture. At the simplest level, this requires asking questions which challenge students to apply the concepts and principles introduced in the lecture. Although most teachers would maintain that they already ask questions in class, a study of college faculty in a variety of different institutions showed that, on average, college professors devote only 3.65% of class time to questioning, regardless of course level or academic field. Moreover, 63% of these questions are directed at the lowest cognitive level, requiring only recapitulation, clarification, or factual responses (Barnes, 1983).

In order to insure that they ask questions from the higher cognitive levels, teachers who are adept at questioning usually prepare for class by writing their questions in the margins of their lecture notes. They also suggest that, although there are many degrees of cognitive complexity, for planning purposes you need only remember three levels: knowledge, application, and evaluation. At the lowest level, knowledge questions help ascertain whether the students have the facts straight--can they recall or recognize basic information?

• Did Descartes believe in God?
• What is the difference between a sodium atom and a sodium ion?
• What three conditions must be met for something to qualify as a business asset?

Median level, or application questions, require students to use information--to deduce the significance of the results of experiments, to apply formulas to new problems, to relate theoretical abstractions to real situations, or to analyze patterns of relationships among concepts and develop generalizations from them:

• How do you know how many times to use l'Hopital's rule in a given (differential calculus) problem?
• How would you explain the connection between confidence interval construction and hypothesis testing?
• How well do American secondary schools fit Weber's definition of a bureaucracy?

Evaluation questions require students to exercise judgment--the highest level of cognition. Students must choose the best alternatives or solutions and be able to justify those choices (in other words, to demonstrate the same thought processes that a professional in the field uses to make decisions):

• What do you think would have been the result if the cotton gin had been invented twenty years earlier than it was?
• In this case study, what would you do if you were the company treasurer?
• How could the nation experience rapid inflation and high unemployment at the same time?

Teachers who use questions regularly in class also use facilitating techniques to keep the process running smoothly. For example, directing questions to individual students (by name, if possible) increases the number of participants beyond the few who take part voluntarily. (Of course, you should be careful to avoid intimidating or embarrassing students when you use this technique.) Waiting for answers for at least 30 seconds increases the number of responses dramatically. Asking students to react to another student's answer fosters cooperative involvement by the entire class. The skillful use of probing questions and follow-up questions will encourage students to try and answer the more difficult and complex questions.

For students, the benefits of interactive lecturing are manifold. They have opportunities to test their understanding of the material as it is presented, their motivation to study and keep up with course assignments improves, and they have many chances to practice thinking critically and creatively.

Although a number of teachers at UNC report that they use questions to promote interaction even in very large classes, the method is clearly more difficult to use in larger sections. Fortunately, there are many other techniques that can spark involvement in learning regardless of class size. Some of these strategies require more elaborate preparation than others, but the payoffs to students are also greater.

Bibliography

• Ellner, C., & Barnes, C. (1983). Studies of college teaching. D.C. Heath: Lexington, MA.