The process that teachers use to question students happens in classrooms every day but the way questioning is done can have a huge effect on the correct determination of student understanding of the current topic of study. Good application of questioning style and type in the hands of an effective educator can demonstrate student knowledge to the teacher that can help them determine when and how to proceed as well as when additional intervention may be necessary. Effective questions, whether written or oral, can supply formative student learning data that will become much more than just questions.

Good questions should be targeted to gauge student understanding of a learning target. To be effective they should be planned in advance and require a teacher to know exactly what target the question is checking. Questions designed without first breaking down the learning targets will not be effective in gauging student learning and quite possibly may cause students to become confused as to what they are expected to know. When applied, these questions serve as a random sample of student understanding. If questioning is not applied completely at random, the sample will always be skewed toward mastery and lead the teacher to believe that mastery is occurring when in reality it may not be.  Questions applied generally to the class with “volunteer” answers will reflect mastery by those who know the answers but will not create a sample that includes those that do not.

Just as the targeting of questions is important, so is the type and use of the questions. There are several types of questions that can reveal the depth of students’ knowledge when correctly applied. Questions that begin with “what” are often fairly low-level questions and are used to check for factual information, but when they are followed with “why” or “how” as well as “explain” can become very powerful questions in gauging a student’s depth of knowledge on a topic. Even basic multiple choice questions, which are prone to guessing and low-level answers, can be made very effective by asking students to explain choices, or even explaining why other choices are wrong or how they could be made into correct answers. 

Perhaps the most powerful type of question of all is the open-ended question that leads to group or class discussion. Often asking one of these and waiting for student responses can lead to a discussion from which the teacher can determine the level of mastery for multiple students. The key to making this type of questioning work is the teacher allowing discussion to ensue while carefully monitoring and redirecting as necessary to keep the discussion going in the desired direction. When open-ended, discussion type questions are used, it is important that the teacher has predetermined the points in the discussion that  indicate students’ understanding of the topic. Participants must also be comfortable with revealing thinking out loud that may lead to wrong conclusions and errors that can be corrected, but with an understanding that this is part of the learning process.

Finally, we should avoid questions that lead to incorrect “self-reporting”. In the book Teach Like a Champion 2.0 [Lemov 2015], the author identifies self-reporting questions as functionally rhetorical questions that are passively answered with a “yes”. Questions such as: “Got it?” “Clear on that?” “Questions?” or “Are you ready to go on?”, are actually not questions at all but statements that say, “I’m about to move on” and do nothing to actually check for understanding. Questions like these should be rewritten to actually look for answers that reveal mastery of a learning target.

Questions are an important part of lesson cycles and the way questions are prepared and presented can be a valuable tool in determining student learning. They are not “just questions” but used correctly are an important part of the learning process.