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The word ‘good’ probably
has too many value based associations to be beneficial. A better word
would be ‘effective’. What is an ‘effective question’? There are three
issues (Purpose, Vocabulary and Source Content) to be considered in
defining and answering this question.
Question Purpose
The first issue relates
directly to the purpose of the question. The immediate purpose of any
‘Inquiry’ question is to gain some specific information that is relevant
to the context. Therefore an effective question is one that returns the
needed relevant information. It doesn’t matter whether the question is
defined as rich, open, closed, fat, skinny, simple or complex; if it
returns the required relevant information then it has been effective and
accomplished the purpose. This indicates that closed or open questions
can both be ‘effective questions’ if they achieve the purpose of
bringing the required information to the inquirer. This also indicates
that any question, be it rich, closed, open or any other definable type,
is an ineffective question if it does not return the information
required by the seeker.
Observations indicate that
in many schools there exists an arguably flawed approach where learners
are being encouraged to write specific types of questions because they
are considered as better than others. This differentiation is applied
particularly to ‘fat’ versus ‘skinny’ questions, and ‘open’ versus
‘closed’ questions where pupils are consistently being given the message
that ‘fat’ or ‘open’ questions are better than ‘skinny’ or ‘closed’
questions. When learners are seeking information the main consideration
should be the ability of the question to return the required information
from the chosen information source. Any particular type of question is
only better than any other type of question if it is effective in
obtaining the required information. There will be times when ‘closed’
questions, for example, are more effective in obtaining the required
information than an ‘open’ question.
This requires us to take a
deeper look at how we scaffold pupils into asking effective questions.
The concepts of open/closed and fat/skinny questions contain some flaws
and don’t necessarily lead our pupils to asking effective questions and
into being ‘effective questioners’. We need to look at this practice a
bit more critically and make sure we are giving the right messages to
our pupils.
Question Vocabulary
The second issue with
defining whether a question is ‘effective’ concerns the relationship
between the vocabulary contained in the question and the vocabulary of
the context. An effective question needs to be constructed with the
relevant vocabulary. The question needs to contain appropriate
contextual key words and phrases relevant to the context, issue or
problem. It is these key words and phrases that will locate the question
within the appropriate context. If a question does not contain relevant
contextual vocabulary it is most likely to be ineffective in returning
the required information.
Source Content (Sources
can vary hugely and may be printed text, digital text, images, audio
visual, or human
The third issue in defining
an ‘effective question’ relates to the source being used. If an
effective question is one that extracts the required information from
the source being queried, the success of the question is also dependant
on the chosen source actually containing the required information. The
inquirer may have created a question that contains the appropriate
contextual vocabulary but if the chosen source does not actually contain
the required information then the question is still ineffective in that
situation. This situation shows us that any particular question may be
effective when applied to one source and ineffective when applied to a
different source. The questioner may have to apply the same question to
a range of sources, and the question is likely to be ineffective in some
me sources, but that does not mean it will be ineffective in another
source.
This opens up the further
issue of questioner skill which will be examined in the next section.
Summary
An effective question is
one that returns the required information, to do this it needs to
contain the relevant contextual vocabulary and the query needs to
applied to a source that contains the required information. These
factors also need to be supported by a range of questioner skills.
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