writing a report

Teacher Questioning Research Study

Introduction

The teacher-student interaction is a very important aspect of education that happens in classrooms. This is essential as it helps the students in a number of ways including enhancing acquisition of basic skills, understanding how to solve problems as well as engaging in higher order thinking including evaluation, these make questions very crucial. The direction of the questions can take either direction, the student may ask, or the teacher asks the students for they are essential tools for teaching and learning.

Teachers need to learn very well how to effectively question. He or she may also teach the students how to ask the right questions. This includes teaching them to raise and formulate important questions. Previous researchers have given some clear pointers as to which forms and kinds of questions work and which ones do not. This has therefore formed the basis of improving the practice of the classroom.

Literature review

Teacher questioning has been a process that has been exploited in different settings for a long time. The most common sequence that has been adopted by the common classroom is the Initiation-Response-Feedback exchange or simply IRF. Here the first person to start the questioning process is the teacher. Then the second person is the pupil who responds to the question. The last step is the feedback from the teacher who gives back the feedback affirming the student's answer of disapproving it. Studies indicate that the some of the teacher-student talks are always an exploratory in nature. However, they confirm that they have always proved the fact that the teacher questioning has improved the performance of the students (Roth, 1996).

Another study indicated that another method is the semantic tapestry approach whereby the teacher may have a multi-prolonged questioning and the stimulation of multimodal conceiving. This method is thought to tap into the multiple intelligences that the students were found to possess. They could use the verbal, visual, the logical-mathematical as well as other methods of thinking of thinking that is in line with their natural dispositions.

The research studies indicate that most of the teachers engage students who are bright in class quite often than those who are not. His makes the brighter students continue outperforming the quiet students who are average and low-class performers. The students who answer the teacher's questions can grasp more than those who do not respond quite often.

Research question

From the above research students, I found out that teachers have different ways they oppose questions to the students. This impact on the students’ performance quite often, thus. Since it was indicated that the outstanding good performers engaged their teachers so much in their questioning. Thus in this research, we expect to work out a correlation between the teacher’s preferred picks and the relative class performance. By recording the number of times a teacher picks any student to answer the question and the type of the student in terms of class performance, we hope to find out if there is a link and what that suggests about the kind of students we as teachers prefer they answer our questions. Do teachers prefer well-performing students to answer their class questions than the lowly performing ones?

Hypothesis: Teacher’s questions best pick correlates to the students’ average class performance in that subject.

Methodology

The qualitative methodology will help to track the number of times a teacher picks on sharp students to respond to his or her questions across different subjects and classes. We trained three students from each class across the schools that participated. We then prepared a response sheet that contained the time a teacher asked a question and the name of the student who was picked to answer the question every time. These forms were filled with the trained students who were part of the class. Hence their purpose was to fill what time the teacher asked a question the name of the student who answered and if it was correctly answered and any other student who was given a chance to give a different opinion contrary to what had been stated by the other student and the contrary answer was accepted.

We then compared the three forms from each class and rerecorded the entries by only taking the entries for student names that appeared in the three forms while discarding names of those found in two or just one form. We also tallied the number of questions that appeared in both the three forms and discarded any further that appeared in only one or two entry forms. We further analyzed the actual performance of the students after requesting for the actual results for the classes on the last three exams.

After finding the averages of the student's performance, we categorized the performance into four categories: group A (>75%), group B(50%-74%) group C(25%-49%) and group D(<24%). We thus replaced the respective students’ names with the performance group category to protect their privacy.

The entry sheet looked as shown below.

School __________________________ Date: __________

Class Level: ______________________

Subject: _________________________

Question	Name of student and state of answer given
	Name	Correct	Name	Correct	Name	Correct	Name	Correct
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Findings

It is observed that over 50% of grade A students were most preferred by the teachers. The second most preferred group of students are those in group B which was preferred to answer 30% of all questions, the third group most preferred group C with a total of 15.5% of the questions being answered. The least group preferred is group D being picked to answer only 4%. Thus, the empirical data that was collected and analyzed confirms the hypothesis that teacher’s questions best pick correlates to the students’ average class performance in that subject.

Question	Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D	Totals
1	36	33	17	7	93
2	40	22	6	1	69
3	27	16	13	2	58
4	32	16	10	1	59
5	30	11	7	1	49
6	22	10	4	1	37
7	15	12	5	3	35
Totals	202	120	62	16	400
% Composition	50.5	30	15.5	4	100

Discussion

During the collection of data, we noticed that the teachers had preferences of whom they picked to answer their questions considering that they do read ahead of the teacher an thus very knowledgeable or are sharp in remembering what they were previously taught. They are most aggressive in class and are not afraid. This also applies to the group B students. For group C most of them are not sure of their answers when picked, and hence they would be supported or corrected by group B or A students. However, for group D, they are shy and too low to be heard by anyone in the class. Mostly would shake their heads a sign of disapproval or unsure of the answer.

Conclusion

The research concludes that class engagement between the teachers and the students depend on the level of performance of the students. This helps the teachers to ask as many questions as possible and let the students do more research on themselves. However, there should be recommendations that the teachers may put more effort to the less perfuming students and give them a chance to revive their performance through answering teachers’ questions in class.

References

Chin, C. (2007). Teacher Questioning in Science Classrooms: Approaches that Stimulate Productive Thinking. JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, 44 (6), 815–843.

Roth, W.-M. (1996). Teacher Questioning in an Open-Inquiry Learning Environment: Interactions of Context, Content, and Student Responses. (S. F. University, Ed.) JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING (33), 709-736.

Heritage, M., & Heritage, J. (2013). Teacher Questioning: The Epicenter of Instruction and Assessment. Applied Measurement In Education, 26(3), 176-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08957347.2013.793190