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The use of questions in a classroom setting is inevitable and a key tool for all educators. Questions in the classroom function as formative assessment tools; however, in recent years questions have been viewed as a way to encourage a greater degree of thought and participation from students (Wallace & Hurst, 2009). How can instructors use questions and questioning strategies effectively in the classroom? Long and Sato (1983) examined the efficacy of display and referential questions and suggested that display questions are more effective in encouraging student learning than referential ones because they limit the potential for syntactic and cognitive complexity in student responses. Yet, they are the most commonly used questions in classrooms (Lee, 2006).

Context has also been researched in classroom settings. Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl (1956) investigated cognitive hierarchies for learning objectives in the classroom. Krathwohl (2002) revised the original version of Bloom’s Taxonomy and claimed that it could be used to assess and measure the cognitive complexity within classroom activities. He relabeled the domains of Bloom’s Taxonomy (from highest cognitive demand to lowest) create, evaluate, analyze, apply, understand, and remember. While the original taxonomy classified learning objectives for classroom use, the revised taxonomy places the objectives in a hierarchy of cognitive complexity.

Previous research addresses the frequency of question types, as well as their capacity to elicit complex student responses; however, the objective of questions in a classroom context is not considered. Instead, the efficacy of questions in prior research was based on student response. This study focused on these questions:

1. What is the distribution of question types throughout a single class meeting time?
2. What are the cognitive objectives of the instructor throughout a single class meeting time?
3. Do these distributions within each cognitive objective change the perception of the usefulness of questions?

METHODOLOGY

A single class session was selected for observation and recording of interactions between an instructor, identified by the pseudonym Jerry, and his students in an intermediate ESL college classroom. The classroom had 26 students. A camera was centered on the instructor to record both audio and video data. The one hour and 30 minute session was recorded, transcribed, and verified. Every question was counted, coded, and placed into one of two categories: display or referential. Although previous research has largely condemned display questions, we considered the usefulness of questions based on contextualization. We defined usefulness as a question that matches the cognitive complexity of the context in which it occurred. In order to measure cognitive complexity, we used Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.

Upon evaluation, display and referential questions were further classified by the taxonomy and scored based on cognitive complexity. Display questions were divided into remember and understand categories with cognitive complexity scores (CCS) of 1 and 2, respectively. Referential questions were divided into categories of apply (CCS: 3), analyze (CCS: 4), evaluate (CCS: 5), and create (CCS: 6). Tag questions and forms that did not pragmatically function as questions were removed from the data.

Context was determined by the instructor’s pedagogical objective for each discrete portion of a single class meeting time. These contexts were evaluated based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy: The cognitive complexity of the pedagogical objective was compared to the categories of the taxonomy, and each context was given a mean score based on the cognitive complexity of the categories included in its teacher objective. Table 1 summarizes this data.

Table 1. Pedagogical Objectives and Their Cognitive Complexity

The data were compiled and the CCS of each question listed with its corresponding context CCS. These two sets of continuous data were analyzed using the Pearson product coefficient to determine whether a significant correlation existed between cognitive complexity of question types and their contexts.

RESULTS

The distribution of question types showed a pattern similar to those found in previous research: display questions (remember and understand) represent 77 percent of the total, while referential questions (apply, analyze, evaluate, and create) comprise 23 percent. With this typical representation of questioning strategies, we evaluated the claims of previous research that teachers rely on seemingly less effective questions.

Chart 1. Overall Question Type Distribution

The question types were examined by their contextual distributions. Table 1 shows the distribution of question types within each context type.

Table 2. Percentage of Question Types in Contexts

We classified the context types on a mean CCS based on the events in each context. Mean score correlates to the score given to each question. Thus, review, which has a low CCS, has a higher occurrence rate than do higher cognitively demanding types like create. As the table shows, the cognitive complexity of the contexts seems to receive similar CCSs for question types used. Our definition of usefulness indicates a similarity between the cognitive complexity of question type and context. With the (continuous) CCSs of 238 questions and the context in which they were each used, Pearson r was calculated. The resulting coefficient was .25, compared to a nondirectional decision of .23 at p < .01. Therefore, we found a statistically significant correlation between the cognitive complexity of questions and their context. The corpus is small, though, and limited to one teacher; thus, further study is necessary.

DISCUSSION

Long and Sato (1983) claimed that referential questions are more beneficial than display questions in the overall context of classrooms. A single classroom context, however, does not construct a comprehensive understanding of actual pedagogical objectives. When an instructor whose objective is to review old information uses a remember (display) question, such questions become appropriate and useful even though they may elicit relatively short, syntactically simple answers from the students. In order to account for the purpose behind display or referential questions, the question types were examined within the context in which they occurred.

This study suggests a link between cognitive objectives of the context types and the question types that occur within them. Thus, higher frequencies of referential questions in more cognitively complex contexts are suitable, while display questions are both useful and appropriate in less cognitively complex contexts. For example, within the context of review, Jerry used 80 percent remember questions and 20 percent understand questions.

CONCLUSION

This study suggests that the frequency of referential questions increases with the cognitive complexity of the contexts in which they most often occur; display questions are both useful and appropriate in contexts with less cognitive complexity; and context is a strong indicator of question usefulness in the classroom. Questions in the classroom should not be assessed in isolation. The purpose and function of questions should be taken into consideration in addition to the resulting response from students. This definition of usefulness does not include student response, which provides an avenue for further research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Ron Lacson, also of Cal Poly Pomona, who worked with us on an earlier version of this article.

REFERENCES

Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals; Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York, NY: Longmans, Green.

Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-218.

Lee, Y. (2006). Respecifying display questions: Interactional resources for language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 40 (4), 691-713.

Long, M. H., & Sato, C. J. (1983). Classroom foreigner talk discourse: Forms and functions of teachers. In H. Selinger & M. Long (Eds.), Classroom-oriented research on second language acquisition (pp. 268-285). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Wallace, R., & Hurst, B. (2009). Why do teachers ask questions?: Analyzing responses from 1967, 1987, and 2007. Journal of Reading Education, 35(1), 39-46.