Day Eleven Teaching Evening (or Extended Time) Classes

In several of the “ideas,” I have mentioned that students need to experience content repeatedly and in a variety of ways throughout the evening for maximum learning to occur. Listening to your explanations is one way to experience the content, but it is not sufficient; responding to clicker questions is another way, working through problem sets in small groups is a third. How about promoting further content experiences through online discussions, practicing sample exam questions with a partner, developing exam or study questions from the readings, and exploring case studies or scenarios in which the content is applied to solve novel problems?

Almost all of these activities require good questions to guide learning and move it from rote/recall to higher order thinking. Crafting good questions is an art and takes lots of practice. A mentor of mine when I was a new instructor shared with me the following information when I was trying to improve my ability to inspire student involvement in class discussions. I have returned to it again and again as I have written questions for many of the purposes mentioned above. I hope you find this helpful as well.

Types of Cognitive Questions (an overview)

Effective teachers are highly interactive with students --that is, they ask a lot of questions and they interact extensively during the instructional process. Teacher/student interaction takes place chiefly through questioning. Most cognitive questions in educational settings fall into three types: (1) recall or memory, (2) classification, and (3) divergent.

A brief explanation of each follows:

1. Recall (memory): requires knowledge of facts only. The learner responds through rote memory. The purpose of the question is to converge ("get") the right answer.
   
   Examples: What is the largest species of whale in the world's oceans? What factors cause a person to be color blind? What is the "greenhouse effect"?
   
   
2. Classification (comprehension): requires the learner to go beyond recall in order to reason out a conclusion and/or solve a problem. This type of question usually requires higher order reasoning, calculating, solving, or comparing in order to arrive at an answer.
   
   Examples: Compare the quality of pineapples grown in Hawaii with those grown in Costa Rica? Considering what you know about the space shuttle, Challenger, what do you think were some of the reasons it exploded? Describe the conditions that must exist to result in a full eclipse of the sun?
   
   
3. Divergent: Divergent questions require creative, imaginative, or inventive responses. For the most part, divergent questions ask for possibilities, or they may state assumptive facts and ask for possible, plausible conclusions. Divergent questions do not necessarily have factual or "right" answers. There "rightness" or "wrongness" can often be judged in terms of logic or sound reasoning.
   
   Examples: How might the world be different if the giant dinosaurs still existed on earth? What kind of plan would you suggest to investigate if the Loch Ness monster actually exists?

Sample Questions That Promote Critical Thinking and Teacher/Student Interaction.

Helping students think critically can be aided by using the a variety of questions, forcing them to experience content by coming at it from various angles: hypothesizing, interpreting, seeking alternative views, raising questions, evaluating findings or opinions, discovering new knowledge/ideas

Hypothesizing

• What do you suppose would happen if ..
  
• You are suggesting that ...
  
• If I understand you correctly, you think. .
  
• Are you trying to tell me that...?

Interpreting

• What do you think this means...?
  
• These findings lead us to make what kind of assumptions. ..
  
• What are we observing here...?
  
• What do these results tell us...?

Seeking Alternative Views

• What might be another viewpoint...?
  
• Is this the only possible solution...?
  
• Have be consider all the alternatives
  
• What other options do we have...?
  
• Are there other ways to look at this...?

Raising Questions

• How do we know this is right?
  
• Do we have to accept these findings?
  
• How can you prove that?
  
• What makes this thing work?

Evaluating Findings or Opinions

• Can this be documented?
  
• Do we need to investigate this further?
  
• Do we have all the data necessary to draw a conclusion?
  
• How do we know that this is correct?
  
• Are there any flaws that exist in these findings/arguments?

Discovering New Knowledge/Ideas

• Has anyone looked at this idea before?
  
• How do these findings/ideas add to the existing body of knowledge?
  
• Are we on the verge of something new?
  
• Where do we go from here?
  
• What exciting new ideals have we just learned?
  
• Based on these findings, what do we know now that we did not know earlier?