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Posing questions is a direct way for teachers to push students to verbalize justifications and make connections among ideas, but this skill is difficult to learn. We recruited four pre-service special education teachers to participate in a semester-long professional development focused on developing mathematics knowledge and asking questions, while concurrently providing 1-1 tutoring to students with learning disabilities. The pre-service teachers increased their frequency of questions overall and of questions that probed students’ thinking or explored mathematical relationships. The pre-service teachers also developed strategies for shifting among different types of questions when students struggled. The findings of this study illustrate the potential for pre-service teachers to develop questioning routines that challenge students while scaffolding their progress towards new understanding.
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Categorizing mathematics teachers’ questioning: The demands and contributions of teachers’ questions
We conducted a review of literature to answer the following research questions: (1) What types of questions do teachers pose in mathematical discussions? (2) What evidence exists of the effects of different types of questioning on students’ learning and participation? (3) What are the implications of existing research for teacher preparation? Existing literature can broadly be categorized according to studies that distinguish between higher order and lower order questioning, studies that characterize and distinguish probing questions, and studies that address teacher questioning in technology-rich environments. The demands of different types of questions need to be considered in light of the broader contributions that such questions make to students’ mathematical learning.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813903
- PAR ID:
- 10338879
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International journal of educational research
- Volume:
- 104
- ISSN:
- 0883-0355
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Question-asking is a crucial learning and teaching approach. It reveals different levels of students' understanding, application, and potential misconceptions. Previous studies have categorized question types into higher and lower orders, finding positive and significant associations between higher-order questions and students' critical thinking ability and their learning outcomes in different learning contexts. However, the diversity of higher-order questions, especially in collaborative learning environments. has left open the question of how they may be different from other types of dialogue that emerge from students' conversations, To address these questions, our study utilized natural language processing techniques to build a model and investigate the characteristics of students' higher-order questions. We interpreted these questions using Bloom's taxonomy, and our results reveal three types of higher-order questions during collaborative problem-solving. Students often use Why, How and What If' questions to I) understand the reason and thought process behind their partners' actions: 2) explore and analyze the project by pinpointing the problem: and 3) propose and evaluate ideas or alternative solutions. In addition. we found dialogue labeled 'Social'. 'Question - other', 'Directed at Agent', and 'Confusion/Help Seeking' shows similar underlying patterns to higher-order questions, Our findings provide insight into the different scenarios driving students' higher-order questions and inform the design of adaptive systems to deliver personalized feedback based on students' questions.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101690
