A reflection of,"The Art Of Questioning."
A reflection of
The Art Of Questioning
When people really want to learn something, they ask questions. They ask questions to become skilled in things they don’t know. Questions can and have been used for a wide variety of educational purposes: reviewing previously read or studied material; diagnosing student abilities, preferences, and attitudes; stimulating critical thinking; managing student behavior; probing student thought process; stirring creative thinking; personalizing the curriculum; motivating students; and assessing student knowledge.
One of the first directions for improving the quality of classroom questions was determining the intellectual level of teacher questions. Broadly conceived, content-or subject-related questions were grouped into two cognitive categories: lower order, for memory, rote, and simple recall; higher order, for more demanding and exacting thinking. The preponderance of lower-order questions was troublesome to educators, for it contradicted the notion of a thoughtful classroom, promoting important if not profound student insights. There are kinds of questioning according to blooms Taxonomy and according to our classmate the fourth reporters. They are the following:
Knowledge: Requires that students recognize or recall information. Remembering is the key intellectual activity. (define, recall, memorize, name, duplicate, label, review, list, order, recognize, repeat, reproduce, state)
Comprehension: Requires that students demonstrate sufficient understanding to organize and arrange material mentally; demands a personal grasp of the material. (translate, explain, classify, compare, contrast, describe, discuss, express, restate in other words, review, se lect)
Application: Requires that students apply information, demonstrate principles or rules, and use what was learned. Many, but not all, educators believe that this is the first of the higher-level thought processes. (apply, classify, solve, use, show, diagram, demonstrate, record, translate, illustrate, choose, dramatize, employ, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, write)
Analysis: Educators agree that this and all the following categories require higher-level thinking skills. Analysis requires students to identify reasons, uncover evidence, and reach conclusions. (identify motives and causes, draw conclusions, determine evidence, support, analyze, deduce, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, justify, distinguish, examine, experiment)
Synthesis: Requires that students perform original and creative thinking. Often many potential answers are possible. (write or arrange an original composition, essay or story, make predictions, solve problems in an original way, design a new invention, arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan)
Evaluation: Requires that students judge the merit of an idea, solution to a problem, or an aesthetic work. These questions might also solicit an informed opinion on an issue. (judge, value, evaluate, appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose, compare, defend, estimate, rate, select)
Also, there are five basic types of questions. Here are the following:
Factual – Soliciting reasonably simple, straight forward answers based on obvious facts or awareness. These are usually at the lowest level of cognitive or affective processes and answers are frequently either right or wrong.
Convergent – Answers to these types of questions are usually within a very finite range of acceptable accuracy. These may be at several different levels of cognition — comprehension, application, analysis, or ones where the answerer makes inferences or conjectures based on personal awareness, or on material read, presented or known.
Divergent – These questions allow students to explore different avenues and create many different variations and alternative answers or scenarios. Correctness may be based on logical projections, may be contextual, or arrived at through basic knowledge, conjecture, inference, projection, creation, intuition, or imagination. These types of questions often require students to analyze, synthesize, or evaluate a knowledge base and then project or predict different outcomes.
Answering divergent questions may be aided by higher levels of affective functions. Answers to these types of questions generally fall into a wide range of acceptability. Often correctness is determined subjectively based on the possibility or probability. Frequently the intention of these types of divergent questions is to stimulate imaginative and creative thought, or investigate cause and effect relationships, or provoke deeper thought or extensive investigations. And, one needs to be prepared for the fact that there may not be right or definitely correct answers to these questions.
Evaluative – These types of questions usually require sophisticated levels of cognitive and/or emotional judgment. In attempting to answer evaluative questions, students may be combining multiple logical and/or affective thinking process, or comparative frameworks. Often an answer is analyzed at multiple levels and from different perspectives before the answerer arrives at newly synthesized information or conclusions.
Combinations – These are questions that blend any combination of the above.
