A question is any sentence which has an interrogative form or function. In classroom settings, teacher questions are defined as instructional cues or stimuli that convey to students the content elements to be learned and directions for what they are to do and how they are to do it.
The present review focuses on the relationship between teachers' classroom questioning behaviors and a variety of student outcomes, including achievement, retention, and level of student participation. This means that certain other subtopics within the general area of questioning are excluded from the present analysis. It does not deal, for example, with the effects of textual questions or test questions, and it is only incidentally concerned with methods used to impart study skills, including questioning strategies, to students.
What are the purposes of teachers’ classroom questions? A variety of purposes emerge from analysis of the literature, including:
* To develop interest and motivate students to become actively involved in lessons
* To evaluate students’ preparation and check on homework or seatwork completion
* To develop critical thinking skills and inquiring attitudes
* To review and summarize previous lessons
* To nurture insights by exposing new relationships
* To assess achievement of instructional goals and objectives
* To stimulate students to pursue knowledge on their own
These purposes are generally pursued in the context of classroom recitation, defined as a series of teacher questions, each eliciting a student response and sometimes a teacher reaction to that response. Within these recitations, students follow a series of steps (consciously or unconsciously) in order to produce responses to the questions posed. These steps include:
* Attending to the question
* Deciphering the meaning of the question
* Generating a covert response (i.e., formulating a response in one's mind)
* Generating an overt response; and often
* Revising the response (based on teacher probing or other feedback)
Classroom questioning is an extensively researched topic. The high incidence of questioning as a teaching strategy, and its consequent potential for influencing student learning, have led many investigators to examine relationships between questioning methods and student achievement and behavior. The findings reported in this summary are drawn from thirty-seven research documents. Twentyone of these are the reports of experimental or correlational studies, thirteen are reviews, one reports the results of both a review and a study, and two are met analyses.