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Grant’s Braes Senior School Action ResearchIssue we want to investigate
Development of questions that require higher order thinking skills from the children in aninquiry
Introduction
This is the third year that Grant’s Braes School have been involved in the ICTPD Cluster and the first year that we have been involved in an action research project. We are welldown the track with our inquiry learning teaching but have noticed that the children’squestioning skills are very inadequate and have not improved over several years. Werealised that we are not doing any active teaching of questioning. If we started to doactive teaching of questioning would it improve the children’s questioning skills?We wanted to develop questioning skills within the senior school so that the children usehigher order thinking skills to ask probing questions during an inquiry topic and thereforedevelop a deeper understanding of the topic.
 
Rationale
The main focus of this action research was to improve children’s questioning skills throughdirect teaching of questioning and therefore enhancing a deeper understanding of thetopic.
Professional Readings
After setting the premise of our research we knew we needed to do some backgroundreading about questions. We were lucky in that some of the speakers at theLearning@Schools conference in Rotorua had focussed on the issue. Each staff member involved in the research undertook to read and summarise the key ideas of a variety ofrecommended papers. This summary was then shared to the others involved, in this waywe were able to reach a consensus about the types of questions we wanted to developin our students, a renewed impetus into the importance of developing questioning skills inour students.These are the main authors and their writings that we used.
1.
 
Jamie McKenzie Questioning Website – www.questioning.org 
Learning to Question, to Wonder, to Learn.He puts forward the concept that questioning is a vital but often poor element indiscussions on thinking, indeed that
 
‘thinking without questioning is like drinking without  swallowing.’
 So by focussing attention on the skill of asking deeper level questioning we will beenhancing the thinking and therefore the learning that our students undertake.
2.
 
Trevor Bond Questioning Website – see cluster website
His summary about questioning and its importance is‘
 An effective question is one that returns the required information, to do this it needs tocontain the relevant contextual vocabulary and the query needs to be applied to a source that contains the required information. These factors also need to be supported bya range of questioner skills.’
 This has a direct bearing on the Inquiry Learning model and helps to highlight the roles ofthe ‘facilitator’ and the ‘learner’.Trevor had also developed a rubric for questioning criteria.
3.
 
E-Best Website – www.ebest.co.nz 
This very informative site which also included a series of questioning types but instead of 7only had 6 steps.They also concluded that‘
 An ‘Effective Questioner’ is one who can:
 
•
 
identify an information need
•
 
pose a range of ‘relevant questions’
•
 
take them to a variety of appropriate sources
•
 
edit questions where necessary
•
 
persist until they locate the required information’
Once again the link between the type of question asked and the learning generatedwere closely linked, supporting the view that investigating and deliberately teachingquestioning was a relevant direction for our research.
4.
 
Hooked on Thinking Website – www.hooked-on-thinking.com 
Pam Hook and Julie Mills are in the business of encouraging teachers to think about whatthey do and why they do it. Their website challenges, informs and gives practical ideasthat we used to help develop our criteria for questions.
Underscoring their philosophy is this quote‘Once you have learned how to ask relevant and appropriate questions, you havelearned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know
- Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Teaching as a SubversiveActivity’
5.
 
Questioning Strategies – www.rapides.k12.la.us/connectedmath/question.htm 
This website contains groups of questions linked to Bloom’s Taxonomy levels.
Method
Grant’s Braes School Questioning CriteriaWhat Makes a GREAT question?
 
Level 1
Poses a statement or provides no response
(e.g. A worm lives inthe ground)
 
Level 2
Any irrelevant question
(e.g. Do trees lose their leaves – aquestion that does not fit the set topic or problem)
Level 3
Relevant Yes/No/Maybe questions
(e.g. Do bees makehoney?)
 
Level 4
Questions that use who, what, when, where, why, how withoutrelevant key words
(one word answer questions – e.g.
 
Whatdoes it mean?)
Level 5
Questions that use who, what, when, where and relevant keywords
(one word answer questions – e.g.
 
Where do bees flyto?)
Level 6
Questions that use how and why and relevant key words
(e.g.Why do bees carry pollen?)
Level 7
Probing questions using two or more question starters using keywords
(e.g. Why do bees carry pollen and how do they use it?)
 
ResultsRoom 1 Results – Year 6Findings
Before teaching questioning my class were predominately asking level 5 and 6questions with a lack of probing questions.After actively teaching the question criteria the children’s questioning is nowpredominately level 7 with the children using a combination of question startersand key words. For ex: What does a bee do with its pollen and how does it collectit? This has lead to the children to having to find more specific information andhas lead to them having a deeper understanding of the topic.Those children who are still at level 6 or below are not using probing questions or are just attaching a why or how to the end of a question without going into moredetail e.g. what does a bee do with its pollen and why instead of probing more for example … what does a bee do with its pollen and how does it collect it?
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