July 07 2006

E-Coaching Tip 18: Questions and Answers -- Upside Down and Inside Out

Faculty ask questions and students answer those questions. Then we know what students know. Right? Well, maybe not.

We may want to turn this traditional model upside down and inside out and try some variations on that traditional faculty question-learner answer model.

We are now at the point in the summer term where many faculty are trying to get a handle on what the students have learned in the first part of the term. Remembering the principle that "Concept development is not a one-time event" we know that students build knowledge over time as a result of a series of experiences.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to do a CAT (Concept Acquisition Test) Scan and get a graphic display of the structure of each student's knowledge of a concept and its links and relationships?  We would then be able to structure and design additional experiences that build on what we know the students know.

Until we have these cognitive scans that graphically map student's knowledge, what tools do we have to discover the state of learner's knowledge and skills? How do we know what the students know is the question? Rather than a focus on having students produce answers, we might turn the tables and have the students ask questions.

Student Questioning -- Inquiry as a Reflection of Knowledge

Why might we want to have the learners ask questions?

We often can't move forward on a problem or learning something new until we can specify what we don't know. By stating what we don't know, we are actually creating a "holding space" within a structure of our knowledge base for that new knowledge or concept.

Let's think about what is required of learners when they are asked to generate the questions. They generally need to think -- to go into their heads, review what is known and identify what question they might have. Learners are often afraid of asking questions -- with good reason, as a question reveals the structure or lack thereof of existing knowledge, links and relationships. Answering factual questions, for example, is often a simple stimulus-response action, requiring little real thought or analysis. More complex questions, however, such as probing or clarifying questions require tapping into a learner's state of conceptual development, and examining the links and relationships that are either formed or beginning to form.

Using Discussion Boards for Student Questioning

The discussion board in online classes is often used to ask students questions, to have them analyze, respond to ideas and statements, etc. and then students' task is to answer, analyze and suggest possibilities and strategies for addressing the problem or scenario.

We ask questions, such as "What do you know? What do you think you know? How do you know what you know? And " What is the basis for your knowledge, and what are the relationships and other links to that knowledge?" These are good. But we may also want to experiment with having the students' generate the questions.

Here are a few specific ideas for challenging the students to come up with tough questions. Any of these activities could be team activities. The simpler activities could be dyad activities and the more complex involving scenarios might be done with a team of three or more students.

• Play a variation of "Stump the FacultyMember" in which the learners generate scenarios, or questions for the faculty member. (Or maybe you can arrange for a nationally-known expert to participate in a discussion and be available for answering questions. This type of experience is ideal for a synchronous event using Horizon-Wimba, once you have tested it yourself. )
• Post a statement, article, scenario, video news clip on the discussion board and ask students to generate a set of data-gathering questions that they would like to have answered to help address that problem.
• Set up a discussion board that students would use to describe problems that they have learned to address and problems that would still stump them. Students can research the net for examples of such problems.
• Establish an open forum for a week and have the students generate questions and problems related to the readings.
• Encourage students to question the information from a web search. Questions that should be encouraged include: Who asserted this? What are this person's credentials? Who had the opportunity to critique this idea? Who supports and who disagrees with it? (Bruckman, 2005, p.36.)

The basic take-away from this tip is to "turn the tables" and have students generate questions for themselves. Questioning by students in an online class can become a form of testing and evaluation; it can also build useful critical thinking skills, inquiry skills and cognitive inquisitiveness about what it is we really do know, why we know something and what links and relationships are part of our knowledge structure. "See you all next week!"

More Background and References

Revised November 8, 2008
Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2008