Questions are an integral part of classroom life and essential to every teacher’s pedagogical repertoire. Questioning serves many purposes: it engages students in the learning process and provides opportunities for students to ask questions themselves. It challenges levels of thinking and informs whether students are ready to progress with their learning. Questions that probe for deeper meaning foster critical thinking skills, as well as higher-order capabilities such as problem-solving. Paramore (Paramore, 2017) identifies an imbalance of questions often found in teaching, saying there is a dominance of teacher talk and an over-reliance on closed questions, providing only limited assessment for learning (AfL) information for a teacher. The issue then is how classroom questioning strategies can become more effective.
What the research says
The value of classroom questioning is well documented. Research tends to focus on the relationship between teachers’ questions and student a
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