Questions and Questioning

Questions One of the fundamental cognitive components that guide human reasoning Threads of coherent reasoning are built around questions that humans ask and their answers Evidence of moving from novice to expert is the quality of questions you ask

Students are not question askers (0.1 question/hour) Students rarely ask questions and most of their questions are shallow. Students can be trained to ask questions. Students who are better question askers are better students.

Questions that Reflect Deep Comprehension Why Why not How What if What if not

Why Study Questions? Good comprehenders implicitly ask explanatory reasoning questions (why, how, what-if, what-if-not, what consequences)

Kinds of Questions Why - Why did events X occur? How - How does process P occur? What-If - What are the consequences of event E occurring? What-if-not- What if state S did not occur?

Types of Questions Procedural/process - How do you do X? Conversation - What did she say? Relational - How much larger…? Gist - What is the main idea? Comprehension - What does that mean? Implication - What would happen if? Inference - Why did that occur? What caused that? Prediction - What will happen?

Implementation: ASK Systems Different kinds of questions: Task oriented Content oriented Metacognitive ASK system - Radiation