Why students don’t ask questions? or maybe they don’t know how?
Step by step technique to teach students asking better questions.
A 4-year old toddler :
‘Mama, why do we need to stop at the traffic light when it turns red?”
‘Teacher, why we cannot talk when we eat?”
‘Papa, why some people are dying?’
‘Mama, why some people get sick.’
If you have a toddler (or used to have a few before they grew up), you will be familiar with these kinds of questions, and sometimes you be left speechless. They are so curious about what is happening in their surroundings and eager to know everything.
It was said that a 5-year old asks on average, 65 questions per day, mostly start with why. But somehow, along the way, especially when they start going to school, they lose their curiosity and eventually stop asking questions.
And we, in higher education, also feel the effect of this.
Our students seldom ask questions, and If they do, it just to get the fast and the correct answer without much thinking needed.
58-year old :
“What time?” “How much?”
By the time you are near your retirement age, you only ask a few questions, mainly about when, where, and how much.
Does it sound ironic?
Why is it important to ask questions?
When we are curious about something, we ask questions, and that is the first step of learning.
The learning of science begins with asking questions as a form of intellectual exploration. Inquiries can be used to gain deep insight, promote critical thinking, opportunity to be independent thinkers, self-directed learners and eventually develop a more innovative solution and problem-solving.
Socrates and Einstein asked a lot of questions, and it had lead them to many fantastic explorations and scientific findings.
The author of this paper mentioned that by asking students to come up with their own inquiry about their course materials help them to
understand how the answers we have come to accept are connected, contingent, and contextual, how they rely on, imply, and beg additional questions.
The problem today isn’t that we don’t have the answers, but we don’t have the questions — Marshall McLuhan
I have talked a bit about the proper questioning technique and examples of questions to ask our learners in my previous entry.
But how about our learners?
Do they know how to ask questions?
Is there any proper technique to teach them to construct their own questions?
We are not born with the skills on how to ask good questions. Like many other skills in life, it requires practice, training and mentoring. And the good news about this is…
It can be taught.
QUESTION FORMULATION TECHNIQUE (QFT)
QFT is a technique initially developed when the founder work with a dropout prevention program in the USA and later the method evolve into a step-by-step, rigorous process that facilitates the asking of many questions. The details and many more free resources can be downloaded from their website.
The steps in QFT :
1. Design a Question Focus (Q focus)
2. Introduce the rules :
Ask many questions as you can.
Do not stop to discuss, judge or answer the questions.
Write down every question exactly as it is stated
Change any statement into a question.
3. Introduce the Q focus and produce the questions.
4. Improve the questions — categorise, discuss and change the questions.
5. Prioritise the questions.
6. Discuss the next steps.
7. Reflect.
This attachment has the details of each step, and this video showed an example of how we can use this technique in the classroom.
Do give it a try and share with us how it goes.
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning — Albert Einstein
