192 JOURNAL of COLLEGE SCIENCE TEACHING

grade level increases, students ask feweron-task attention questions (Good,Slavings, Hobson Harel, and Emerson1987, 186). Good et al. suggest that thisprobably occurs because students do notwant to call attention to themselves. Italso seems that fewer questions are askedin class because teachers often do notlike students to ask questions.

Wood and Wood (1988) havespeculated about possible reasons thatteachers do not want pupils to air theirown views. First, they claim, manyteachers feel they are paid to educate

Over 30 years ago, Carner(1963) recommended thatteachers focus their attentionon the questions students askin class. Studies show that as

Answering the Need for High-Level Questions in Science

Gili Marbach-Ad is a post-doctoral re-search associate and Phillip G. Sokoloveis a professor, department of biologicalsciences, University of Maryland BaltimoreCounty, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD21250; e-mail: sokolove@umbc.edu.

pupils, to transmit knowledge, and toprepare students for the future; suchteachers are often afraid to lose controlof the classroom. Second, it takes classtime for students to contribute their ownideasperhaps at the expense of otherpoints a teacher wants to cover.

Although it appears over time thatstudents ask fewer and fewer ques-tions, this is true only in the classroom.As Dillon (1988) noted, children askmore questions as they get older, butthey do so outside of the classroom.We see this happen in elementary andsecondary schools (Dillon 1988; Goodet al. 1987), and we see it happen atthe college and university levels (Westand Pearson 1994).

One of us (PGS) teaches an intro-ductory biology course for majors inwhich an important goal is for studentsto learn to appreciate science. For thatto happen, however, students must firstrelearn how to ask more effective in-class questions; initially inquiries suchas those that curious young children

make (why? how?) and later questionslike those that scientists ask.

We believe that good science be-gins with good questions, and one ofour objectives is to encourage studentsto recognize good questions (i.e.,those that would be considered good ina scientific context because they areoriginal and insightful ones about howthe world works; cf., Heady 1993) andto ask more and better questions. How-ever, to help students evaluate ques-tions, we need to provide them withappropriate criteria together with ex-amples of different types of questions.Only then can they begin to recognizewhich are high-level and which are low-level questions (fig.1).

In our study we asked for typewrit-ten questions that students had to for-mulate outside of class after reading se-lected chapters in their textbook. Wefollowed this procedure to obtain ques-tions from all students (rather than justthose willing to volunteer), and to givestudents time to think before they posed

Students in a large, active-learning, freshman biology classlearned to ask better questions with the aid of a new tax-onomy for student questions. The taxonomy provided atool that helped them (and the instructors) to evaluate thetheir questions and prompted the students to ask more high-level questions as the semester progressed.

Those who ask questionsteachers, text, testsare notseeking knowledge; those who would seek knowledgestudentsdo not ask questions.

J.T. Dillon (1988, 197)

Begins WithGood Science

Good QuestionsGili Marbach-Ad and Phillip G. Sokolove

193VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 3

a question. In addition, we thought thatit would be less intimidating for themto ask questions without having to con-front the entire class.

When we searched the literature forcriteria to classify students questions,there was virtually nothing that allowedus to classify questions that students inscience courses ask, or might be encour-aged to ask. Many researchers have de-scribed the type of questions that teach-ers ask in an effort to elicit student re-sponses and thereby to assess studentunderstanding. They have found it help-ful to develop various (and often com-parable) categories of such questions.Several systems, such as Blooms(1984), Carlsens (1991), Carners(1963), Gallaghers (1965), andHoustons (1938) consist of general cat-egories that are based on thinking op-erations and the questions that stimu-late them irrespective of content.

Other schemes do deal with stu-dents questions (Watts, Gould, andAlsop 1997; West and Pearson 1994);however, the questions are usually stu-dent-initiated, verbal, in-class ques-tions. These schemes generally fail tocapture the full range of complex andhigh-level questions that one finds inwritten ones. Because we could not findan appropriate theoretical framework tocategorize students written questions,

we decided to use the students ownquestions to help us identify and de-velop a new and practical taxonomy forthis purpose.

The New TaxonomyThe current study was conducted in oneof two large sections of Biology 100 inthe fall of 1998 with an enrollment of267 students. The course was taught inan active-learning style employing stu-dent-centered, constructivist-based, andinteractive instructional approaches(Sokolove 1998).

We examined a large sample of stu-dent questions from the homework as-signments given in our class. Based onour reading of students questions, weidentified eight categories and arrangedthem in a semi-hierarchical order fromlow-level to high-level questions.

The eight categories listed in fig-ure 1 seemed to fall into four majortypes:s Type I (Category 0): Questions do

not make logical or grammaticalsense or are based on a basic misun-derstanding or misconception. Suchquestions can be very useful to theinstructor. In Biology 100 theyhelped the instructor to identify whatsort of preconceptions or misconcep-tions students had after reading achapter at home, and before they dis-

cussed the subject in class. We feelthat these questions will enable in-structors to understand what priorconceptions students had in mind, toidentify students misunderstand-ings, and to change their way ofteaching. We agree with Watts et al.(1997) that diagnosing pupils ex-isting understandings is important inorder to understand the perspectivesfrom which they see the world. . . .

s Type II (Categories 1a and 1b): Theseare questions about a simple or com-plex definition, concept, or fact that astudent could have looked up in thetextbook. Most of the questions thatfell into category 1a suggested to usthat the students who wrote them didnot read the chapter at all, or did notread it carefully. Most of the questionsthat fell into category 1b suggested thatthe students who prepared them didread the chapter carefully but did notunderstand what they read. Usually 1bquestions dealt with definitions or con-cepts that were objectively complex.

s Type III (Categories 2, 3, and 4): Theseare questions in which the studentseeks more information than is avail-able in the textbook. Questions that fellin category 2 asked about motivesor intentions. Usually these ques-tions dealt with ethical, moral, philo-sophical, or socio-political issues.

Figure 1. Categories of Students Questions

0 Question is not logical or grammatical, is based on a basic misunderstanding or misconception, or does not fit in anyother category. (Translation seems to be a process of trial and error. Noting this, how is it so efficient in its productionof protein?)

1a Question about a simple definition, concept, or fact that could be looked up in the textbook. (What is the differencebetween diploid number and haploid number?)

1b Question about a more complex definition, concept, or fact explained fully in the textbook. (Could you please explainthe steps of meiosis and [indicate] after each step how many chromosomes are present?)

2 Ethical, moral, philosophical, or sociopolitical question; often begins with why. (Why doesnt the FDA bansunscreens with an SPF of less than 30?)

3 Question for which the answer is a functional or evolutionary explanation; often begins with why. (People wearclothes, so why do they still have body hair?)

4 Question in which the student seeks more information than is available in the textbook. (Are all viruses necessarilydetrimental to their host cells? If so why?)

5 Question resulting from extended thought and synthesis of prior knowledge and information; often preceded by asummary, a paradox, or something puzzling. (I know that proteins are synthesized in the cytoplasm, but then how doribosomal proteins get into the nucleus?)

6 Question that contains within it the kernel of a research hypothesis. (Since it has been observed that certain bloodtypes are predominant in people from different regions, was there a time in history when one blood type was moreadvantageous than the other?)

Category Description of Questions

194 JOURNAL of COLLEGE SCIENCE TEACHING

Generally there were only a few suchquestions, mainly concerning genetics.Questions that fell in category 3 soughtinformation about why the world is theway it is. Many of these questions wereevolutionary questions, i.e., ques-tions for which the answer is an evo-lutionary explanation. Category 4questions were all the other ones thatstudents asked to seek information notgiven in their textbook.

s Type IV (Categories 5 and 6): Theseare questions in which students mustemploy higher-level thinking skillssuch as integration of information ac-quired earlier in the semester. The dis-tinguishing feature of a category 6question is that it contains within it thekernel of a hypothesis. Such questionstypically precede scientific research.

This taxonomy, once constructed, notonly enabled us to evaluate studentsquestions, but also helped us to explainto students what type of questions weconsidered to be high-level.

Evaluating Students QuestionsThree times during the semester, stu-dents were asked to bring an original,typed question to class after readinga textbook chapter. The first home-work exercise (Chapter 10; Starr andTaggart 1998) dealt with meiosis. Thesecond homework exercise was basedon two chapters (Chapters 13 and 14),one of which dealt with DNA struc-ture and function, and the other withthe relation between DNA and pro-teins. The third (Chapter 42) dealtwith digestion.

The first homework exercise wasgiven to the class at the beginning ofthe semester, the second in the middle,and the third toward the end of the se-mester. Homework questions were col-lected and categorized using our newtaxonomy. After the second homeworkexercise the instructor presented thenew taxonomy in class and provided anexample question for each category.

ResultsTable 1 and figure 2 present our resultsregarding the student questions we re-ceived in response to the three home-work exercises. The distribution forChapter 10 questions was similar to that

for student questions based on Chap-ters 13 and14 except in categories 4 and5. After reading Chapter 10, more stu-dents (23 percent) formulated questionsthat fell in category 5 (questions result-ing from extended thought and synthe-sis) than they did after reading Chap-ters 13 and 14 (13 percent).

In contrast, after reading Chapters13 and 14, more students (32 percent)formulated questions that fell in category4 (questions requesting specific informa-tion not readily found in the textbook)than they did after reading Chapter 10(20 percent). Nonparametric analysisshowed no significant difference, how-ever, between the overall distributionacross question categories for the twosets of questions.

On the other hand, similar analysisshowed that the dif-ference between theset of questions gen-erated after readingChapter 10 (or Chap-ters 13 and 14) andthe set of questionsfrom Chapter 42 washighly signif icant(p< 0.001). Inspec-tion of the datashowed that the dif-ferences were due tothe fact that fewerChapter 42 questionswere classif ied incategories 0-4 (TypesI, II, and III) than questions from Chap-ters 10 or 13 and 14 (56 percent versus70 and 80 percent, respectively),whereas more Chapter 42 questions fellinto categories 5 and 6 (Type IV) thanquestions based on Chapter 10 or 13 and14 (44 percent versus 30 and 20 per-cent, respectively).

Impact on Question-Asking SkillsThe presentation of the new taxonomyin our class probably had a significantimpact on students questions. First,based on their responses it appeared thatstudents began to understand what sortof questions we expected them to ask,and second, they become more discern-ing in their evaluation of questions.Only after students were given an earlydraft of the taxonomy did they begin to

demonstrate significant improvement.In addition to the presumed influence

of our presentation of the taxonomy to theclass (which was late in the semester),there were other variables that might wellhave influenced the type of question a stu-dent formulated for a given exercise. Wecan suggest three possibilities: content ofthe chapter, the students backgroundknowledge or understanding, and the levelof biological organization.

First, it seems reasonable to us thatsubjects with which the students aremore interested or more familiar willlead them to ask more thoughtful ques-tions. Second, we feel that individualswill generally ask better questions whenthey have more knowledge about thesubject. Thus, little or no knowledgeshould generally result in relatively na-

ive questions, while more knowledgeabout a topic should enable one to askquestions that are insightful or sophis-ticated. Others have expressed similarthoughts. Olson, Duffy, and Mack(1985) suggest that, Intuitively, thereis a link between ones knowledge orunderstanding of a topic and the abilityto ask a question about it (p. 219).

Third, in many areas of biology (ge-netics, for example), one can distinguishbetween the macroscopic level (organ-isms or populations), the microscopiclevel (cells), or the submicroscopic level(molecules). Research on genetic con-ceptions has shown that students typi-cally have more difficulty understand-ing processes and relationships at themicroscopic and submicroscopic levelsthan they do at the macroscopic level

Table 1: Percentage of students questions in

homework exercises

Category

0

1a

1b

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter 10N=182

15%

12%

12%

1%

10%

20%

23%

7%

Chapters 13/14N=188

13%

11%

11%

3%

10%

32%

13%

7%

Chapter 42N=173

8%

5%

9%

2%

2%

30%

30%

14%

195VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 3

(Marbach-Ad and Stavy). This mightexplain why there were more questionsthat fell into category 5 after studentsread Chapter 10 on meiosis (a processthat takes place at the cellular level) thanafter they read Chapters 13 and 14 onDNA (which deals with molecules andmolecular processes).

ConclusionWe have developed a new taxonomy thatcan be used to categorize and evaluatebiology students questions and determinewhether students in an active learning, in-troductory biology class can learn to for-mulate high-level, written questions. Theresults suggest that the taxonomy alsohelped our students understand how torecognize and write better questions.

We also feel that there were posi-tive side effects in asking students toformulate written questions after read-ing chapters at home. One of the majorcomplaints of instructors is that stu-dents do not read the book before theycome to class. Focusing on question-posing forces students to read first inorder to write their questions. We de-liberately asked students to type theirquestions so that they would be morelikely to complete the assignment athome and not during the first minute ortwo of class. The second side effect isone that we previously mentioned: theopportunity to understand what studentshave in mind and to uncover their mis-conceptions and/or preconceptions.

Our new taxonomy may not fit allcourses or subjects even in sciencecourses, but we hope that it will serveas a model that others can help us re-fine, or perhaps use to construct theirown.

One might wonder if our effortsalso increased the number and qualityof verbal, voluntary, in-class studentquestions. Although we have not com-pleted our analysis of in-class video-tapes, preliminary observations suggestthat students do ask more and betterquestions than in a comparable lectureclass. More important, perhaps, is thefact that students in the active-learningclass wrote many more questions aboutbiology to the instructor on e-mail andhanded the instructor many more writ-ten questions after the class period.

0%5%

10%15%20%25%30%35%40%45%

Perc

ent o

f Que

stio

ns

Type I Type II Type III Type IVQuestion Type

Student Questions after Homework Reading

Chapter 10Chapters 13/14Chapter 42

Figure 2: Distribution of student questions written after reading one or

more textbook chapters

AcknowledgmentThe authors thank Ellen Beck, MA, So-ciology, UMBC, for her help in process-ing the data and providing statisticalanalysis.

NoteThe research was supported in part bya grant from the National Science Foun-dation, REC 9815007.

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