Questions Overview

Different Types of Questions. Facilitating student discussions can be one of the most difficult aspects of
teaching. Listed below are some different types of questions one might use to encourage student
participation in class.
Concrete Experience (CE)
Open Ended Questions
 What's Going On?
 What do you make of this situation?
 Could you be more specific?
 What are your suspicions?
 Casting question nets out to see what comes in. Listening for entry and emphasis points.
Asking for Information
 Where? When? Who? What? Facts and opinions.
Publish/Process (P&P)
Diagnostic Questions
 What did you observe
 How do you weave these points into some kind of understanding of what else is going on,
possibly behind the scenes?
 Who else had the same experience?
 Who reacted differently
 How do you interpret and explain "A" and "B's" impact on the situation?
Challenge Questions
 Why do you say that?
 How would you explain?
 Where is the evidence for what you say?
 How can you say a thing like that?
 Is that all?
 That's just the opposite of what Student X said. Can you persuade him/her?
 How was that significant?
 What does that meant to you?
Extension Questions
 Exploring the issues. What else?
 Can you take us farther down that path or find new tributaries?
 Keep going

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  Therefore?
 How do those fit together?
 What does that suggest about yourself/group?
 What do you understand better about yourself/group
Generalize New Information (GNI)
Generalizing and Summarizing Questions
 What inferences can we make from this discussion and case?
 What generalizations would you make?
 Does that remind you of anything?
 How does this relate to other experiences?
 What did you learn/relearn?
Combination Questions
 How would you relate your points to those mentioned by Student A or to something else you
said?
 How would you understand X in light of Y?
Priority Questions
 Which issues do you consider most important?
 Where do you start?
 How would you rank these?
 What do you associate with that?
Develop/Apply (Value/Check on Learning)
Action Questions
 What would you do in Person X's shoes? How?
 How would you apply/transfer that?
 What modifications can you make work for you?
 What would you like to do with that?
Prediction Questions
 What do you think would happen if we followed Student Z's action plan?
 Give us a forecast of your expectations.
 How will he/she react to your thinking?
Summarizing Questions
 How would you summarize the three most critical issues that we have discussed?
 Can you summarize the high points of the discussion thus far?
 What were the pluses /minuses?

CFDP-IC Lesson 8 HO5-2

References
Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning Harvard University. Some Different Types of Questioning.
Retrieved from http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58474/questioning.html
Pfieffer, J. W., & Jones, J. E. (1979). The 1979 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators: Processing
questions for each stage of the experiential learning cycle. San Diego, CA: Pfieffer and Co.
Copyright © 2002-2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Permission is granted to non-
profit educational institutions to print and distribute this document for internal use provided that the Bok
Center's authorship and copyright are acknowledged.

CFDP-IC Lesson 8 HO5-3