How to Ask Questions That Promote High-Level Thinking

How to Ask Questions That Promote High-Level ThinkingAuthor(s): Kieran EganReviewed work(s):Source: Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Apr., 1975), pp. 228-234Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1492320 .

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How to Ask Questions that

Promote High-Level Thinking

KIERAN EGAN

Asking questions is one of the commonest teaching techniques. The most educationally valuable kinds of questions are those requiring students to extend knowledge, deepen understanding, or achieve new insights in the process of composing a response. They challenge and motivate students to make inferences they might otherwise have missed, to analyze concepts they might have accepted simplistically, to synthesize ideas they might never have seen connections between, to render judgments of value leading to wiser decisions, etc. When such questions-commonly classed as divergent-are well posed, they help realize some ideals advocated under the label discovery learning.

The enormous teaching power of well-posed questions we generally recognize, and what research exists indicates they contribute significantly to student achievement. Unfortunately, though, most of the literature on question-asking tends to describe and classify, usually concluding with exhortation rather than practical techniques. Over half a century of evidence of the much greater educational value of divergent (or analysis, synthesis, and evaluative) questions over convergent (or knowledge, comprehension, and application) questions, and exhortations to improve the quality and kind of questions asked has led to no significant shift from a persistent, enormous preponderance of factual recall questions.2 This suggests the not-surprising conclusion that recognition and detailed classification of a problem coupled with exhortation, is insufficient to solve it.

Perhaps the main reason such slight progress has occurred, despite a constant literature telling teachers to ask different kinds of questions, is that engaging the higher-level intellectual processes by questioning is a lot more difficult than realized by many persons doing the telling. Also, of course, the typical way we organize classes militates against exploiting the potential of divergent questioning. Recent research has suggested that in discourse with a class some

KIERAN EGAN is assistantprofessor of education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

'Francis P. Hunkins, "The Influence of Analysis and Evaluation Questions on Achievement in Sixth Grade Social Studies," Educational Leadership Research Supplement (January 1968), 326-32.

2Romiett Stephens, "The Question as a Measure of Efficiency in Instruction," Teachers College Contribution to Education No. 48 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1912), and the replica of that study in Thomas Howard Adams, " The Development of a Method for Analysis of Questions Asked by Teachers in Classroom Discourse," Dissertation Abstracts, 25, 5 (1964), 2809 (Rutgers University), both cited in Caroline J. Gillin et al., Questioneze (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1972), p. 1.

APRIL 1975 228



teachers ask an average of 3.5 questions per minute,3 and normally wait only one second for an answer.4

In this article I want to describe a new technique that offers a means of routinely engaging the higher-level intellectual processes. But, alas and of course, there is a price. Payment must come in the form of time and disturbance to some established routines. It also requires the sacrifice of the smooth informality of typical classroom discussions and introduction of an artificial, slightly cumbersome element. One other thing must be sacrified: the belief that students can achieve high-level, analytic, synthetic, and evaluative thinking by simply chang- ing the kind of questions teachers ask. But still, as this technique enables us to do with only minor difficulty something of considerable educational value (hitherto enormously difficult), it seems to me well worth the price.

The technique is called Structural Communication (S.C.). Invented in England about five or six years ago, development work continues there and is beginning now in a few centers in North America. S.C. contributes to a number of educational activities, including simulation gaming, assessment, and teaching complex subject matter clearly.5 Here I want to concentrate on those features of S.C. that sustain the claims suggested above about its contribution to asking questions that promote high-level thinking.

The Means of Response As a result of the experimental work preceding development of S.C., researchers and

teachers concluded that most students rarely engaged in sophisticated and fruitful thinking when challenged by a divergent question unless also provided with things to think with. That is, one of the weaknesses of oral divergent questions seemed to be that they left the student with the complex, often confusing, task of working out first what would serve as answers, and then which of these ideas, or which combination of them, would offer the best answer. (This in no way leads to an argument for making thinking overly simple for students, but rather suggests that our implicit assumption that everyone understands what we mean because we find it clear misleads us into believing that communication of complex ideas without ambiguity is much easier than in fact it is.)

In designing S.C., then, experimenters tried to deal not only with how to pose questions but also with how to enable students to think most fruitfully in devising their responses. They had to devise some kind of medium that would reduce the noise in the communication process, remove irrelevant and distracting intellectual activity (like data retrieval and formulation), and focus precisely on analytic, synthetic, and/or evaluative thinking about the appropriate subject matter.

A good response medium should delimit the world from which students would compose the answer, restrict the relevant vocabulary, reduce the task to appropriate proportions, and allow as much freedom as possible within these restrictions. Teachers needed something that

3William D. Floyd, "An Analysis of the Oral Questioning Activity in Selected Colorado Primary Classrooms," Dissertation Abstracts, 22 (1960), 45 (Colorado State University); cited in Questioneze, p. 3.

4Mary Budd Rowe, "Science, Silence, and Sanctions," Science and Children (March 1969), 11-13; cited in Questioneze, p. 3.

5For details of these and other uses of the S.C. method, see Kieran Egan, Structural Communication (Belmont, Calif.: Fearon Publishers, forthcoming).

APRIL 1975 229



PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION

provided a sensible middle ground between a too-restricted response medium which would inhibit higher-level thinking-such as one finds in linear and branching programs, and a too-open medium that lacks sufficient guiding limits to the student's inquiry and thus serves to discourage thinking of any kind-such as one often finds in oral divergent questions, or those questions starkly posed at the end of a chapter of a text.

Thus, research designers created the matrix system. The matrix arises out of composition of a set of divergent questions on main subthemes-in our model, for example, questions investigating Elizabethan sea merchants. (See figure 1.) The matrix is designed so the student

On a unit about the Elizabethan Merchant Adventurers, the set of questions investigating the main subthemes may be abbreviated as follows:

1. What factors favored the growth of the company? 2. Construct an argument for the claim that the Merchant Adventurers were not very adventurous. 3. Why did the company's fortunes decline during the latter part of the century? 4. Why was there a burst of new trading activity after 1551?

Figure 1.

cannot go through it item by item simply ticking off relevant entries according to a yes/no criterion like a big multiple-choice game. (See figure 2.) Rather, the student builds an adequate response by combining items, and the organization does not allow one to be included without affecting all the others. So a single, whole, and coherent response is required, rather than an uncoalesced set of relevant items. A matrix with twenty items allows more than a million different responses. A lot of these would be incoherent or meaningless, of course, but a large number could represent adequate responses to any particular question.

Use of a set of divergent questions directed at the same matrix enhances the process and vitiates any potential comparison with multiple-choice techniques. (See figure 1.) Each question engages the student in viewing the matrix from a different perspective, and composing from its elements different arguments. (See figure 2.)

It may clarify what kind of intellectual tasks the student engages in if I describe briefly how the matrix is constructed. We may represent our understanding of a particular body of material in a simplified way by means of a ven diagram. (See figure 3.) The subthemes we perceive in the body of material are suggested by A, B, C, and D. We then compose our questions to investigate each subtheme. The body of material we classify carefully into elements of appropriate general- ity and randomly place in the matrix. The challenge set by the questions, then, will engage the student in recomposing into some coherent form the set of subthemes, and, in the process, in rebuilding the body of material. Unlike typical divergent questions, which would tend to treat the subthemes as more or less discrete areas, employment of the matrix as a medium of response encourages the student to recompose a structural coherence across the whole area. Thus interconnections between subthemes become as important in building responses to questions as the factual content itself. The student also discovers clearly that factual content is not fixed and inflexible, but may be combined in different ways to produce different, sometimes opposing, arguments.

APRIL 1975 230



How TO ASK QUESTIONS THAT PROMOTE HIGH-LEVEL THINKING

Increasingly English seamen Parliament back- Money was avail- often interlopers hoped for the ed up the Mer- able in London, ignored the Mer- good luck of the chant Adventur- to back risky chant Adventurers Spaniards in ers' claim to expeditions. monopoly and finding silver control the sale traded in cloth and gold. of cloth abroad. with the Contin- ent.

1 2 3 4

Henry VIII de- Some foreign Trade with the Henry VII nego- based the coinage. trading organiza- Continent was tiated the

tions were weak- disrupted by wars "intercursus ening. of religion, and Magnus."

the Spaniards' destruction of Antwerp.

5 6 7 8

The Merchant Ad- Some of the new The Merchant Ad- It was "outport" venturers' monop- trading ventures venturers intro- merchants who oly was with- ? reaped enormous duced "stints." first traded drawn. profits. with the Americas.

9 10 11 12

In 1485 the cus- The price rise Steps were taken The Merchant Ad- toms tax on cloth affected the to repair the venturers had to was only 3 per- Continent more damage done to pay heavily for cent of the strongly than the coinage by the privileges cloth's value. England at first. Henry VIII. granted to them

in Elizabeth I's reign.

13 14 15 16

The formation of The Merchant Ad- By trying to The Merchant Ad- the joint-stock venturers con- sell undersized venturers con- companies offered tinually appealed cloths during trolled nearly a new means to the Govern- the boom years, all the cloth of financing ment for protec- the Merchant Ad- passing through trading expedi- tion against com- venturers damaged the port. tions. petitors. their reputations

abroad. 17 18 19 20

Figure 2. Response Matrix from which responses to the four questions are composed.

APRIL 1975 231




Figure 3.

Discussion of the Student's Response Once the student responds, a further stage seems required before the questioning cycle is

complete. We want to evaluate the response in some way, to ascertain its appropriateness or adequacy, and if satisfactory, we will want to extend thinking from it. This extension may assume the form of discussion, a response to the response, or a further question. Because S. C. was designed to engage students in relatively complex thinking, designers decided that resultant responses should be treated with appropriate complexity. That is, it would be insufficient to reduce it to a single comment or a single direction. Teachers would need a means of exploring many ramifications of the response-thus, the discussion guide and sets of prepared comments. (See figure 4.)

Question 1

1. I 4and6

2. I 11and 18

3. 0 3or8 >

4. 0 13or 20

5. 5 or 14

A

(A, B, C, etc. refer to the B comments which would normally

be printed below) C

D

E

6. I any three or more of 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17 and 19

F

Figure 4. Discussion Guide

232 APRIL 1975



How TO ASK QUESTIONS THAT PROMOTE HIGH-LEVEL THINKING

Figure 4 offers an example of a discussion guide prepared for question 1 of the Merchant Adventurers unit, a typical classroom unit. We would read as follows: the first test under question 1 signifies, "If you included in your response items 4 and 6, then read comment A." The " 0" in the third test under question 1 signifies, "If you omitted from your response .. " The tests are carefully designed, and revised in light of field-testing, to investigate a variety of aspects of the student's response, and for each one there is prepared a comment of some appropriate kind.

The first tests we design to catch items the student included that seem irrelevant or to catch those cases where the student omits apparently essential items. In these instances the prepared comment will explain why the items were considered either irrelevant or necessary for that question and either suggest reading some material on the topic or reattempting the question.

Thereafter a teacher may pose a variety of tests to see whether the student included combinations suggesting a particular bias (then, the teacher could direct the student to a comment outlining reasons for an alternative position); whether the student included a set of mutually contradictory items; whether he included or omitted items whose presence or absence from the response was of interest for other reasons that might be dealt with in comments.

In typical oral discussions, whole areas of most students' thinking are not considered at all. Using a discussion guide, one ensures that all main points for each question are raised, that each student's response is analyzed in some detail, and that he is directed precisely to those comments appropriate for him. That is, a part of fruitful questioning involves an evaluation of the results of the question and a further extension of thinking after the initial response.

How to Use the Techniques in Classrooms

Clearly the technique cannot be adopted directly to a typical free-flowing oral discussion. If one wants to benefit from the technique one must adapt the typical oral discussion somewhat to accommodate it. I will describe below, then, one way of using the technique to promote high-level thinking, and, as a result, a more sophisticated discussion.

The teacher may overcome the sticking point about free-flowing oral discussion if he allows about an hour to prepare a matrix on the theme prior to class discussion. (With practice, teachers can construct effective matrices in less time. Do not consider it a definitive resume of the theme but rather a set of the main facts, concepts, judgments, etc., constituting a sufficient variety of elements to allow students to think sensibly about it. A typical matrix for an oral discussion in class might be a lot simpler than that in figure 1.) With a matrix provided, students may be asked to compose their responses by combining elements provided in the matrix, adding other items if they find the matrix inadequate for saying what they want.

If, then, instead of preparing for a discussion in the usual way, the teacher prepares a matrix and a set of questions, the teacher may employ easily the technique in the classroom. He may write the matrix on a blackboard or hand copies to each student. The teacher may ask questions orally, or he may distribute these on the sheet with the matrix, leaving students time to respond to each question by writing down numbers corresponding to items he would choose in composing an answer.

A discussion guide, as in figure 4, can help the teacher focus on crucial omissions, inclusions, and combinations significant for proper consideration of theme. It can also assure consideration of all aspects of the theme and controls and orchestrates a sophisticated discussion. Coming to the oral discussion after students have responded to the questions by means of

APRIL 1975 233




the matrix, the teacher may be confident that each student has thought in a relatively sophisticated way about the theme, has considered all its key features from a number of perspectives, and has committed himself to a particular viewpoint on each.

The teacher may handle the discussion in a number of ways. In the simplest he selects a combination of omissions likely to promote contention and asks: "Who omitted items 6 and 15 from question 1?" A proportion of the class will indicate they have, and informed argument may begin, focused precisely on a significant aspect of the theme. When this discussion apparently exhausts itself the teacher may ask about other combinations. (This can also be a most fruitful teaching period, due to the efficiency with which the matrix can allow one to consider quite complex ideas in combination by calling out a few numbers. For example, one may ask: "Has anyone thought of putting items 3, 18, and 20 together for question 4?" thus sparking ideas possibly extremely difficult to suggest by other means.) Before engaging in discussion the teacher may want to compose notes for comments that seem appropriate for particular inclusions, omissions, and combinations of items.

Conclusion

Using this technique would obviously be more cumbersome than discussing a unit of work with students in the usual, more or less informal, way. But I think the artificialities of the technique pay for themselves again and again. Similarly, most users agree that the matrix system introduces an actual restriction on the students' inquiry, but, again, I consider the restriction most fruitful. Just as we tend to overestimate the clarity with which we can communicate relatively sophisticated ideas, so we fail to realize how restrictions in scope may allow great gains in thinking precisely. Rather vague ideas about the value of open "inquiry" can blind us to substantial gains won in moderately extending students' thinking abilities by controlled means.

Clearly I am not writing about all questions all the time. The stark divergent question that requires the student to organize an essay-type response from a vast mass of material is ideal for certain purposes, and no doubt multiple-choice and linear program kinds of questions achieve desired goals in other situations. However, I am writing about a large range of questions commonly asked for pedagogical purposes, and, it seems to me, best used in conjunction with a supplied response medium like that of Structural Communication unit.

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How to Ask Questions That Promote High-Level Thinking