One page summary

Introduction

Teaching students to generate their own questions about material to be read is an important prereading instructional. When readers are involved in asking questions, they are engaged in active comprehension. Teachers can use an active comprehension strategy when they ask questions that produce questions in return. For example, show students a chart and ask a question that prompts student questions in response, “What would you like to know about the chart?” Students focus on the details on the chart.

Active comprehension questions not only arouse interest and curiosity, but also draws learners into the material. As a result, students will read to satisfy purposes and resolve conceptual conflicts that have identified through their own questions.

Instructional Strategies for Engaging Students in Questioning

Questions in the classroom are the cornerstone of education. They provide the stimulus for critical thought and deep-level understanding. Questions engage and excite the learner while providing them with new insights and ideas about the material being learned. Teaching students the cognitive strategy of generating questions about the material they had read resulted in gains in comprehension, as measured by tests given at the end of the intervention." Questioning not only helps a student take control of his own learning, but a student's comprehension is largely benefitted as his level of understanding increases. Clearly, questioning is a vital component to learning whether it is initiated by the teacher or by the student. The cognitive processes that take place when a question is posed or formulated carries with it many educational advantages.

When teachers present questions to their students, the goal is not simply to elicit a response. The teacher's objective is to engage the student in learning and encourage thought on many levels. A teacher's questioning not only promotes this critical thought, but it helps a learner regulate his own learning, thereby motivating him to want to explore a subject deeper and more fully. Cotton outlines what steps a learner undergoes as he encounters a question and it is interesting to note that not all of the steps are actively pursued by the learner. Many of them are subconscious, however they are no less vital components to the knowledge-building process.

Kinds of Questions

There are two sorts of questions: those that require higher-level thinking skills and those that demand lower-level cognitive skills. Developing an effective question is the key to encouraging critical thought and deep-level understanding. While it would seem that higher cognitive questions would be more advantageous to a learning environment, that is not always the case. Different learning populations and different topics being taught demand different styles of questions. It is only once a teacher is familiar with what and to whom he is teaching, that a teacher can develop effective questions to promote critical thought in his classroom.

Students who answer their own questions show improvement in reading comprehension. When students know prior to reading that they each need to think of a question about the text, they read with an awareness of the text's important ideas. With exposure to expository text, students learn how to summarize and how to use graphic organizers, such as question webs.

Challenge your students with all levels of questions as defined by Bloom's Taxonomy. They will be doing higher-level thinking and you will have a more interesting classroom. Bloom offers a "stair step" description of the levels of human understanding, with each new level building on previous levels. Bloom's taxonomy divides human cognition into five levels. The reading instructor can use these five levels to devise questions about reading selections that target higher-order thinking skills. The taxonomy provides categories of thinking skills that help educators formulate questions. The taxonomy begins with the lowest level thinking skill and moves to the highest level of thinking skill. The six thinking skills from lowest level to highest level are:

· Knowledge

· Comprehension

· Application

· Analysis

· Synthesis

· Evaluation