Questioning Strategies

Classroom Examples of Questioning Strategies

Questions with different purposes promote critical thinking about what is being read and about what can be asked and answered before, during, and after reading. Before students read, they use questions to activate prior knowledge, make predictions, and ponder essential ideas that are not answered in the text. During reading, students formulate questions to compare and generalize, identify the theme, and clarify meaning. After they read, students use questioning to locate information to understand and remember events and characters and to identify the theme.

Thin and Thick Questions
Questioning: A Comprehension Strategy for Small-Group Guided Reading
In this lesson, the teacher differentiates between thin (factual) and thick (inferential) questions, and then models how to write question webs using “think-alouds.” Students learn how to add information about the topic to question webs. They also practice composing thin and thick questions and monitoring their comprehension, using question webs independently in small-group reading.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=408

Questioning the Author (QtA)
McKeown, Beck, & Worthy (1993) propose a strategy designed to encourage students to think beyond the words on the page, to consider the author's intent for the selection, and to consider how successful the author was at communicating it. The standard format of this strategy involves asking students to read a selection of text (one or more paragraphs, but generally not as much as a whole page), and then answer these five questions:

1. What is the author trying to tell you?
2. Why is the author telling you that?
3. Does the author say it clearly?
4. How could the author have said things more clearly?
5. What would you say instead?

http://www.readingquest.org/strat/qta.html

Question Answer Relationships (QAR)
Raphael (1982, 1984) created Question-Answer Relationships as a way to help students realize that the answers they seek are related to the type of questions they ask. This activity encourages them to be strategic about their search for answers based on an awareness of what answers the different types of questions seek. Even more important is understanding from where the answer will come.
Teaching QARs begins with helping students understand the core notion that when confronted with a question, the answer will come either from the text or from what they already know.
http://www.readingquest.org/strat/qar.html

McLaughlin and Allen (2002) developed the Guided Comprehensive Model of the Question-Answer Relationships strategy. Most grade 4 to 6 students can decode but need help with comprehension. They need to learn how to monitor their thinking and to make connections between texts and their own experiences. This model introduces students to the comprehension strategy of self-questioning. Students learn the types of question-answer relationships (QARs), identify where and how answers can be found, and demonstrate their understanding of the strategy.

[McLaughlin, M., & Allen, M.B. (2002). Guided Comprehension: A teaching model for grades 3–8. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.]

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy Questioning with Students
Bloom's Taxonomy provides a structured presentation of human cognition from low-level thought processes like simple recall to higher-order thinking skills like synthesis and evaluation. Bloom offers a "stair step" description of five levels of human understanding, with each new level building on previous levels. The reading instructor can use these five levels to devise questions about reading selections that target higher-order thinking skills.
http://www.justreadnow.com/strategies/bloom.htm