Creating Quality Questions MMAWR 2023-10-10 06_03_01 2023-10-10 06_04_43

The topic is about questioning strategies that promote thinking. Quality questions can initiate discussion, focus on the author's message, or identify difficulties in the text. The second strategy is the request process, where students analyze short segments of text and ask questions to understand it better. The third strategy is the question-answer relationship (QAR), which categorizes questions into four types: right there, think and search, author and you, and on your own. Each type requires different levels of understanding from the text. These strategies help develop critical thinking skills in students. Hello, this is Shannon Blonsky, and today's topic is why ask? Questioning strategies that prompt thinking. So when creating quality questions, these are not only initial questions, but they are also questions that bring up effective follow-up questions and elicit student responses. So there are many different ways that you can come up with these quality questions, and so the first kind is questioning the author or QTA. This is a text-based strategy that invites the reader to interact with the information and build the meaning from the context by analyzing the author's purpose. So this kind of questioning prompt comes with goal and what kind of questions you would ask with that. So like to initiate discussion, there's what is the author trying to say? Or what is the author's message? Or what is the author talking about? Or if your goal was to focus on the author's message and link information, you could ask questions like, that's what the author says, but what does it mean? Or how does that connect with what the author already told us? Or if your goal is identify difficulties with the way the author has presented information or ideas, you could ask, does that make sense? Or is that said in a clear way? And there are many different other ways that you can also create quality questions. The second one that the book talks about is the request process. And so basically, it's a simple one to implement in the secondary classroom. And it's basically where the teacher chooses a passage of text and then designates short segments within the passage to the students to analyze. So first, there is the questionnaire portion and then the respondent portion of this request task. So the questionnaire will read the first passage silently and pay attention to the information it contains. And then think of questions to ask. They can try and use their own words, but not exact phrases from the passage. And then they keep their book open while they ask their question, listen to the answer, and then check to see if it's accurate. If it's not, then they ask another question to help the person arrive at the correct answer. And then they would repeat this two to three times and then change roles between the two people. The respondent task is to read the first passage silently and then pay attention to the information it contains, just as the questionnaire. And they think of questions you might be asked and then check the passage and make sure that you have those possible answers in your back pocket. And then they, the respondent, unlike the questionnaire, closes the book and they answer each question that they are asked. And then you can ask the question to rephrase it if you do not understand. And then this also is repeated two to three times. And these two roles switch back and forth so that students can fully understand how, like, the passage works and if they understand what is actually being said in the passage. The last kind of strategy is the question-answer relationship or the QAR strategy. And this describes four different types of questions. The right there, think and search, author and you, and on your own. And it is based on three categories of question qualification, sorry, classification, not qualification, described as text explicit, where the answer is found directly quoted in the text, text implicit, where the answer must be inferred from several passages in the book, and script implicit, which requires both the text and prior knowledge of the experiences. So a right there kind of question, if we were talking about the declaration of independence, a right there question would be, when was the declaration signed? And so answers to right there questions are in the text and so the words are usually match a sentence in the text. So the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4th, 1776. A think and search question would be, what are some of Thomas Jefferson's noble accomplishments? And so answers to think and search questions are in the text and the answer is compiled through segments of several sentences. So you can look up and see that the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4th, 1776, John Hancock signed first, and Thomas Jefferson, the author, signed as a delegate of Virginia, and he later became the third president of the United States. So you thought about what the text gave you, but then you searched up for some other information about the person in the question. So the author knew a question that could be part of this is, what influence and did participation in the development of the declaration have on the signers? So answers to author and you questions are not in the text. You need to consider both what the author has told you and what you already know about the topic. The on your own question that you can come up with is, if you were a delegate on the Second Continental Congress, would you sign? Answers to on your own questions are not in the text and you need to consider your personal experiences to answer. And of course there are many other ways on coming up with these quality questions and critical thinking questions, but these are just a few that we decided to look at within the book.