3.1 Implementation Questioning: The teacher used questioning strategies to encourage participation, check on skill development, and facilitate intellectual engagement and productive interaction with students about important science and mathematics content and concepts.
Questioning strategies can be successfully employed by teachers in order to manage student attention, encourage intellectual engagement, and ensure active participation in the lesson activity. Questioning strategies can also develop students’ procedural skills by helping to remind or cue them to steps in a known process or to scaffold the development and use of an accepted explanation, laboratory procedure, or mathematical model. Questioning strategies can serve as a way to engage students in the review of concepts the class has already covered, reminding them of what they learned in recent activities or lectures. Questioning may also be used to introduce students to the focus and purpose of the lesson, especially when new concepts or ideas are to be explored and when the teacher needs to draw upon students’ prior knowledge. Effective questioning strategies include appropriately using “wait time,” and validating all responses to maintain rapport in a low-risk, collegial classroom environment.
The types of questions a teacher may use range from simple procedural checks on understanding to more challenging probes that force students to think critically and to synthesize what they already know and apply it to novel situations. Intellectually engaging and challenging questions can be used to facilitate students’ development of conceptual understanding as well as identify prior conceptions and uncover misconceptions by investigating incorrect answers though follow-up questioning. This indicator assesses the degree to which the teacher uses appropriate questioning strategies for any and all of these purposes.
General Rubric
- This item should be rated a 1 if the teacher used little or no appropriate questioning strategies that engaged students with important science or mathematics content or concepts at any level during the lesson.
- This item should be rated a 2 if the teacher occasionally or sporadically questioned a few students to refocus attention, encourage participation, or check on skill development, but there were no instances of questions that challenged students to think critically about important science content or concepts.
- This item should be rated a 3 if the teacher regularly used questioning techniques to encourage and maintain participation and to check on skill development and progress with the lesson activity during some portions of the lesson, especially the introduction and wrap up. The teacher asked appropriate procedural and factual questions about important science or mathematics content or concepts but rarely challenged student thinking with question probes for deeper understandings or misconceptions.
- This item should be rated a 4 if the teacher frequently used questioning techniques to encourage and maintain participation and develop skills throughout the class period. Some questions were asked that probed student thinking about important science content or concepts, uncovering alternative or misconceptions that were then appropriately used by the teacher to get students to reflect and expand further on this content or concepts.
- This item should be rated a 5 if the teacher consistently and continually used multi-level questioning strategies to encourage and maintain participation and to check on skill development and students’ progress with the lesson activity throughout the class period. In addition, the majority of questions asked probed students’ thinking about important science content or concepts deeply, challenging preconceptions and assumptions and pushing students to develop new knowledge or novel applications.
Specific Examples of Supporting Evidence
- There were few to no examples of appropriate questioning strategies used in this lesson. For example, in chemistry class, the teacher called out the atomic number of an element on the periodic chart and called on students in alphabetical order, expecting them to read the name of element out loud to the class. If a student did not respond with the correct name or pronunciation, the teacher ignored the response and moved on to the next student. The teacher used no wait time and, when frustrated by the hesitation of the students’ response time, simply read the name of the element himself. Even if other students called out responses, the teacher continued without acknowledging what the students were saying.
- The majority of the teacher’s questions were closed-ended and structured to ensure that the students responded with the one and only correct answer. For example, in chemistry class, the teacher called out the name of an element from the periodic table and asked students to state the number of protons and electrons for the element. If students gave incorrect responses, the teacher corrected them but missed multiple opportunities to ask follow-up questions of students about their mistakes to see what misconceptions might have led to their error. One student asked if the number of protons had to equal the number of neutrons “like hydrogen,” and the teacher responded, “No, we’ll get to that later.” The teacher did not consistently use an adequate amount of wait time and talked extremely fast so that all elements in the periodic table could be covered in the amount of time allotted for this part of the lesson.
- The teacher asked the students a lot of questions to prompt interaction and response, but the questions were frequently more procedural than conceptual. For example, in chemistry class, the teacher assigned each group of three students to draw graphs of atomic and ionic radii of all member elements of a specific group on the periodic table and write a narrative comparing their graphs and discussing how these elemental periodic properties differ. The teacher did maintain the student-focused integrity of the group learning activity by asking questions rather than telling them the expected answers, but much of his questioning dealt with directing the students to complete the steps for graphing the data, rather than probing for student ideas about the underlying explanations for the periodic trends the activity was designed to uncover.
- The teacher checked in with each group and asked them questions about the activity and the reasoning behind their actions or solutions for the task assigned. For example, in chemistry class, after reviewing the graphs of atomic and ionic radii created by each group in the assignment described above, the teacher followed up by asking students to draw scaled models of the elements as neutral atoms and as charged ions. If a student group appeared stumped, the teacher sometimes gave the students more information than necessary for them to move forward with their modeling instead of asking questions to probe more deeply about what they actually knew and why they hesitated to draw what they were thinking. Overall, the teacher asked thought-provoking, higher-level questions of all of the groups when checking in with them, and some groups of students were able to draw fairly accurate representations of atoms in the neutral and ionic states.
- The teacher purposefully and consistently used multiple probing questions to allow students to express incomplete understandings or alternative points of view or misconceptions. For example, in the chemistry class task described above, the teacher asked each group of three students to split up and compare their graphs and drawings of atomic and ionic elemental representation with another group’s set of elemental representations. The teacher encouraged students to critique and question their classmates’ work in response to and extending upon their ideas. He used follow-up, probing questions about these student-derived explanations and representations in order to develop the “big picture” of periodic trends across each elemental group and period for the whole class. The teacher relied on direct instruction only when absolutely necessary, instead using student-derived artifacts with questioning strategies to skillfully guide students to explore, explain, and develop their own explanations about how fundamental concepts of periodicity form the basis for the organization of the periodic table.