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Santiago Bermudez

Dr. Smith

ENG 101 B24O

November 3, 2017

The main focus in education is what is the best way to help a student learn, which

can be difficult because students have their own ways of learning. When a student is not

learning, some questions that arise are, is it the lack of effort by him/her? Or the way the

information is being taught? Students need to be challenged to be able to help them learn

more and think more critically. One thing that should be done to get students to learn

more is to have more questioning during classes and on assignments. This will help the

student think more and possibly challenge him/her to do more to come up with an

answer. This will keep him/her more focused and intrigued in class.

When adding more questioning it will make the student think a lot more and

deeper. Lets say the teacher gives an assignment and its only one question thats very

straight forward, and only focuses on one answer. This will limit the students thinking

capability and they will only focus on the answer that they are suppose to give. I believe

that when adding more questioning to an assignment or making it more of an open

answer question it will make the student think a lot more and require more effort of

him/her to completely answer that question. This should also be the same in class when

the teacher is giving them a question, it should be an open question with open answers

because this helps the student really think a lot more about what is the right answer to the

question that is being given. According to the University of Illinois, High-level

questions involve the ability to analyze, evaluate, or create and encourage students to

think more deeply and critically. This is one area where I think questioning can help the
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students think more critically and actually make them become more involved and more

active in learning.

Another way that adding more questioning can benefit in the students learning is

that it forces the student to do more research. Adding more questioning to an assignment

can make the answer more open, which will make the student do more research on his

part. This will definitely benefit the student because while doing their research they will

be more involved in their assignment and they will have to do more work. This will help

them because they will learn a lot more than answering a straight forward question that

only leads to one specific answer. They will gain a lot more knowledge by challenging

them a lot more on assignments. When doing more research they will most likely have an

idea in mind on how they are going to answer the question, but they will run into

different ideas that they havent thought of. It will open their mind and they will look at

things in a different way. They will think more critically about the question and those

other ideas that they found and try to connect them. This will help them gain a lot more

knowledge and change the way they think and have them think more critically.

What questioning can also bring is interaction. This is said to really benefit

students and it actually helps them learn a lot more. Questioning results in debates and

arguments in class between the students and the teachers which helps them express

different ideas between each other. Interaction lets the students gain more knowledge by

listening to the ideas of others and it opens their views and they start thinking more. This

method of education that involves interaction between students and teachers is called the

problem posing education. In the Banking Concept of Education by Paulo Freire it says,

The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but who is himself taught in

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dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become

jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. As you can see, everyone benefits

from interaction the students and the teachers. But to begin and keep the interaction going

is about questioning and challenging the students to explain more and go more in detail.

This will help the students learn a lot more.

Although open answer questions are the ones that help the students think more

critically and make them do a lot more research, there are other types of questions that

could be asked that can also benefit the students learning. According to an article written

by the University of Washington in St. Louis, You should also use closed questions or

questions with limited answers which will test the students comprehension and retention

of information that they are given. This is a very good point made that changing the

method of questioning can also change the way the student answers the question, and it

can help them in keeping the important information that they are taught and be able to

understand it. It is also the responsibility of the teacher to add different questions during

the lecture like open and closed questions to have the students thinking and have them

more intrigued in class. Another thing the teacher can do after presenting a question to

the students is that they should give the students some time to think after asking the

question instead of rushing them to come up with a response. In the same article

presented before by the University of Washington in St. Louis it says, Waiting 5-10

questions will lead to longer, more complex answers. Giving the students more time to

think when asked a question will lead to better answers by the students, which means

they are thinking more to come up with that answer. What can also happen is that the

students wont come up with an answer, so as the teacher you shouldnt answer the
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question for the students, but instead rephrase the question to help the students

understand it. As you can see its not just the questioning part but the teacher also has to

do her part to keep the students thinking.

Overall, more questioning will benefit the students in learning more whether it be

during lectures or on assignments. Adding more questioning will lead to the students

thinking more critically, doing more research, and it will spark interaction and

discussions, which will lead to new ideas. This is why I believe that having more

questioning will be a start to helping students learn more.