Teacher Questioning in Science Classrooms

Chin, C. (2007). Teacher Questioning in Science Classrooms: Approaches that Stimulate Productive Thinking. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(6), 815-843.

Background

The author highlights research that shows that, when students learn Science, they construct meanings and develop understandings in a social context through classroom discourse as part of teacher talk and teacher–student interactions. The kinds of questions that teachers ask and the way teachers ask these questions can influence the type of cognitive processes that students engage in.

Aims

The aim of the study was to find out how teachers use questions in classroom discourse to scaffold student thinking and help students construct scientific knowledge.

Sample

Taking part in the study were six teachers teaching Grade 7 Science classes from four schools over 36 lessons.

Method

The lessons were audiotaped and videotaped. Verbal transcripts of classroom discourse were analysed interpretively. Attention was paid to questioning exchanges that stimulated productive thinking in students, as manifested by their verbal responses. Students’ written work provided additional information about the classroom contexts.

Findings

The results revealed four different productive questioning approaches adopted by the teachers:

• Socratic questioning, including strategies such as ‘pumping’ in which teachers use questions to encourage students to give more detail;

• verbal jigsaw, including strategies such as ‘verbal cloze’ where the teacher speaks out the first part of the expected answer;

• semantic tapestry, including strategies such as ‘stimulating multimodal thinking’ in which the teacher asks questions to encourage learners to think in a variety of different modes (e.g. visual, symbolic, verbal); and

• framing, including strategies such as ‘question-based summary’ to go over the key concepts covered in the lesson.

Implications

One implication is that the productive questioning approaches can make explicit the relationships among the concepts being addressed. For example, when using a verbal cloze question, the language load was reduced, which helped students with weaker language skills to answer the question.

Another implication is that the questioning approaches identified in the study could be understood as one variation of an inquiry-based pedagogy that is adapted to teaching large classes involving student engagement through scientifically orientated questions posed by the teacher. The authors argue that although the students in some classrooms may appear as passive members of a large audience, they may be actively participating in thought-provoking tasks mediated by teacher questioning.

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