Last week, we looked at initial cognitive strategies: attention, repetition, and paraphrasing, leading up to the use of questions, which is the main subject of this week’s article. Children naturally ask questions, from a very early age. This begins at home, long before they go to school. Parents play a major role in developing the use of questions as a cognitive learning strategy and as the first step in the process of critical thinking.
There are many variations on how to ask, and answer, questions. The first thing a parent should think about is the purpose of the question: why are you asking it? There are four general levels of responses you will be looking for.
1) First level: Recall of basic facts.
That is, remembering the little pieces of a scheme, like, for example, Who was the first President of the US?’.
One good way to approach questioning is to start at this level and move on to more complex levels. The presumption is that, if your child does not know the basic facts, she will not be able to answer more complex questions.
What, when, how, where and who are the starting points. ‘Why’ gets more serious. While making sure that their own questions are well formulated to elicit good, and thoughtful responses, parents should also pay attention to their children’s questions from early on, as soon as the child can string together three or more words.
In terms of their own questions, parents can, in a direct and simple form, raise questions directly related to the immediate environment:
What or who is that?
How does it work?
What does it do?
How many are there?
When did it happen?
When you did that, what happened?
These questions channel attention, focus it on specific issues, and increase the possibility that your child will retain specific and related information. Good basic questioning significantly helps strengthen the underlying structure and schemes where the information is stored. Such questions help children to review existing schemes, assimilate and reorganize them and broaden the underlying knowledge structure.
Questions and Reading Comprehension
Using questions is very good when trying to teach reading comprehension to your child. The ability to read and fully understand what has been read, and then be able to explain it, is one of the most important elements of mastery required to be a successful learner.
One of the basic tasks is to develop the ability to recognise and decode words automatically (i.e., without having to pay attention to the decoding steps). When decoding is automatic, the reader will be able to read at a faster rate, say 45 words per minute, which will allow your child to focus on sentence integration and semantic processing. If your child reads too slowly, the information being read will tend to fade from the working memory before sentence or paragraph completion, thereby impeding comprehension.
The child’s ability to read is one of the highest predictors of his future success in school. Questioning is a good way to guide attention and strengthen comprehension.
To the questions listed above, we may add:
What does this word mean?
What does this sentence mean?
What is the most important sentence in this paragraph?
Who is the principal person or character in this story? Who are the secondary characters?
What is happening in the story?
Does the principal character initiate action?
What does the character want to achieve, what is his goal?
Where does the story take place (setting)?
Is someone going from one place to another?
What is the basic point or purpose of the story?
2) Second level: Your child should be able to describe situations, clarify information, use maps, demonstrate rules, and show knowledge of order and evidence of comprehension.
Questions may include:
What are the key vocabulary words? Do you know what they mean?
What is the main idea of this paragraph, article, or chapter?
Can you summarise the paragraph?
How are … and … alike or different?
What is the funniest/scariest/best part of the story?
What is the author (or the article or story) trying to convince us of?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of….?
How is this idea related to that idea or concept?
Give me a new example of…
How does the author put the ideas in order?
3) The third level: where analytic thinking, logical reasoning, explanation, identification of principles and concepts involved, etc, are required.
Are any of the main characters like you or like somebody you know? What makes you think so?
Why do spiders weave webs?
What happens when water boils?
Why does rain fall?
What would happen if >>> and >>> are combined?
What is the difference between … and …?
How could … be used to …?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of….?
What do you think would happen if we had no bones?
How are bones and muscles similar? Different?
4) The fourth level: when you expect your child to be able to demonstrate evaluative thinking, showing criteria for determining the adequacy, appropriateness or quality of ideas, concepts and principles.
What conclusions can you draw from this?
Why is it important that…
How does the main idea of this paragraph, article, chapter relate to what you already know about the topic?
Can you identify the three most important ideas that can be related to the main idea?
Do you think that character A had her feelings hurt by what character B said?
Was what character B did right or wrong?
Would any of your friends/family enjoy this book? Why or why not?
Could you come up with another good title for this book? What would it be?
What if you could change the ending of this book, what would it be?
Do you think this book would make a good movie? Why or why not?
There are also prompting questions which may be used at any level. They are designed to get your child do amplify their responses.
Can you tell me a little more?
Do you agree with me on this subject?
What would you like to know about this story (about dinosaurs, about space travel, etc.)?
What do you think we should do next to solve this problem?
What is your opinion about these drawing/pictures?
If we amplify the questions a little – why? - when? - what for? - what does that mean? - how do you know?, the questions begin to foment relations between schemes and within existing structures and help develop internal connections and increase the meaningfulness of the information. Also, this amplification can help in the stimulation of the child’s curiosity.
Look at the issue of who asks the questions and when. In general terms, questions that are asked prior to presenting new information have the tendency to facilitate the learning of facts in a verbatim form, while questions that are asked after new information has been presented seem to strengthen conceptual learning or learning of non-specific information.
In the cognitive strategy of asking question, we have a group of general issues. For example, specific questions are better than general ones. It is not always easy for parents to ask such questions because they sometimes do not know the specifics of the curriculum. But if your child brings a homework assignment, then the specifics are stated by it.
The most important aspect of the questions strategy, which I cannot over-emphasise, is: teaching children to generate their own questions. It is a significant contributor to helping your children to become more curious, reflexive, and inquisitive. Generally, the act of asking questions, which is modelling the concept, should lead to your child’s ability to ask questions. You will want to encourage her to ask questions and you may need to prompt her to do so.
Sample questions to ask your child so sh can formulate her own questions:
What questions would you ask about this reading?
What do you think you should ask about that?
Can you suggest the most important aspect of this subject?
If you were to ask a classmate about this, what would be the key question?
When you are thinking about this, what do you ask yourself about it?
Warning! One small risk when asking questions is over-prompting, that is, providing too much information to the child so that finding the answer does not require any significant mental effort. The question should give enough information so that the she can search in her memory for the answer, but not give so much information that she can easily find the answer.
(Dr Clifton Chadwick, Center for Research on Teaching Critical Thinking at British University in Dubai)
(If you want to comment or ask questions, write to clifton. chadwick@buid.ac.ae)
UP AHEAD
Next week: How to use images to reinforce learning and thinking.