How to Use Questions to Promote Student Learning — from scholarlyteacher.com by Spencer Benson
Excerpt:
Developing Faculty Generated Questions
Developing good questions that enhance student learning and engage all students is difficult. The challenge is constructing questions that engage learning and are “un-Googleable” meaning that students cannot find the answer with a simple online search engine. Some ways to help make questions “un-Googleable” are to
- Avoid questions that simply ask for facts or definitions,
- Ask the students to answer the questions based on their own personal experience,
- Ask students for their personal opinion on an issue,
- Ask students to describe the answer a different person might give, e.g., a relative, a famous person (historic or present), the textbook or assigned readings author, etc.
These three questions align with the various levels of Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, “what” asks about facts and content (remembering), “how” asks about relationships (understanding and analyzing), and “why” asks about higher cognitive level skills (creating and evaluating).