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In this book we describe the features of good questions, show how to
create good questions, give some practical ideas for using them in your class-
room, and provide many good questions that you can use in your mathe-
matics program.
1 What Are Good Questions?
Let us have a closer look at what makes a good question. There are three main
features of good questions.
■ They require more than remembering a fact or reproducing a skill.
■ Students can learn by answering the questions, and the teacher learns
about each student from the attempt.
■ There may be several acceptable answers.
This section explains these features in more detail.
John and Maria each measured the length of the basketball court.
John said that it was 25 yardsticks long, and Maria said that it was
24 yardsticks long. How could this happen?
Some fifth- and sixth-grade students were asked to discuss this question in
groups. They suggested a variety of plausible explanations and were then asked
to suggest what they need to think about when measuring length. Their list
included the need to:
In this section, we have looked more closely at the three features that categorize
good questions. We have seen that the quality of learning is related both to the
tasks given to students and to the quality of questions the teacher asks. Students
can learn mathematics better if they work on questions or tasks that require
more than recall of information, and from which they can learn by the act of
answering the question, and that allow for a range of possible answers.
Good questions possess these features and therefore should be regarded as
an important teaching tool for teachers to develop. The next section shows two
ways to construct your own good questions.
How to Create
2 Good Questions
Good questions can be used as the basis for an entire lesson either as a lesson that
stands alone or as part of a unit of work. It is possible to make up your own good
questions for any topic and any grade level. The important thing is to plan the ques-
tions in advance, as creating them is not something that can be done on your feet.
When you first start using good questions you might find helpful the collec-
tion of questions in Part Two, “Good Questions to Use in Math Lessons.” After
awhile you will want to create good questions for yourself. Detailed on pages 7
and 8 are two methods that can be used to construct good questions. The one
you use is a matter of personal preference.
Some more examples of how this works are shown in the following table.
question
space What is a square? How many things can you write about this
square?
addition 337 + 456 = On a train trip I was working out some dis-
tances. I spilt some soft drink on my paper
and some numbers disappeared. My paper
looked like
3?7
+??6
7 9?
What might the missing numbers be?
subtraction 731 – 256 = Arrange the digits so that the difference is
between 100 and 200.
time What is the time What is your favorite time of day?
shown on this clock? Show it on a clock.
The more experience you have with good questions the more you will
want to use them, and the easier it will become for you to make up your own.
Refer to either or both of these methods until you feel confident.
Using Good Questions
3 in Your Classroom