Questioning and Comprehension in the Disciplines

1. Proficient Readers

1.1. Someone who uses existing knowledge to make sense of new information, asks questions about the text before, during, and after reading, draws inferences from the text, monitors his or her comprehension, etc.

1.2. To understand is to retain, to recall what you are reading, to explain, to infer, to interpret, to conclude, to answer and generate questions, to rethink ideas, etc.

1.3. All content areas should focus on how the teacher engages the reader to think critically about texts, and demonstrate and use his or her understanding.

2. Questions, Questioning, and Comprehension

2.1. Asking "good" or effective questions is more important than knowing the right answer.

2.2. The questions we ask will influence what students learn in class.

2.3. Students need to learn to provide sufficient and clear arguments to support their thinking.

2.4. Students need to develop critical thinking skills.

2.5. CCSS is moving away from a single correct answer to a question and to the possibility of multiple correct answers that are supported by evidence. This requires deep comprehension and not just memorization, etc.

3. Self-Questioning Strategy

3.1. It aims to help students critically question what he or she is reading and understanding, question the author's purpose and credibility, provide textual evidence for all answers, make connections among concepts and ideas from this and other topics examined so far, etc.

4. Discipline-Specific Habits of Mind and Questioning

4.1. Effective questions, questioning text, questioning others and one's self-knowledge, can help shape students' reading, thinking, studying, and learning behaviors; they can produce ways to read and learn that are helpful and specific to each discipline.

4.2. See Table 6.11 to see different lense samples disciplinarians use--i.e., how they read and think, what questions they ask, etc.

4.3. Historians (Social Studies): Do close reading of texts, ask who, what, when, where, why, how, identify a topic of interest and focus on it, oral communication, etc.

5. What Makes a "Good" Question, "Good"?

5.1. Have more than one answer

5.2. Frame and focus inquiry efforts

5.3. Do not result in obvious and immediate answers

5.4. Realistic, relevant

5.5. Challenge students

5.6. Facilitate connections for a deeper understanding

5.7. Promote reflection

5.8. Good questions challenge students' comprehension of texts, and involve them in analysis, evaluation, collaboration, and synthesis.

5.9. Text-dependent questions' goal is to keep the student inside the text for the purpose of figuring out the text. Use them to facilitate deeper understanding of the text and to think outside of the box.

6. Essential Questions

6.1. "Big ideas" are the fundamental and recurring themes of each discipline, they categorize and help us make sense of many facts.

6.2. They can help students develop a thorough and deep understanding of each big idea.

6.3. Broad, open-ended, guiding questions that frame effective instruction.

6.4. They help students understand the purpose or theme of the lesson, make connections between concepts or ideas, approach the answer in a variety of ways, etc.

6.5. Each academic discipline is characterized by its own unique, essential questions. e.g., "To what extent is hydraulic fracturing/fracking helping or harming humankind?"

7. Question-Answer Relationships

7.1. It's a framework for helping students understand how to self-question using different types of questions. It supports reading comprehension.

7.2. QAR can be used with narrative and informational text.

7.3. QAR teaches students to use information sources: text and prior knowledge.

7.4. The four question-answer relationships fall under the following two categories:

7.5. A. In The Book: Answers are usually literal and can be found in the text.

7.6. 1) "Right There" Questions

7.7. 2) "Think and Search" Questions

7.8. B. In My Head: Answers are inferential and span beyond the text.

7.9. 1) "Author and Me" Questions

7.10. 2) "On My Own" Questions

8. How to Use the QTA Technique

8.1. 1) Select the text and decide what you want your students to understand or analyze from this text.

8.2. 2) Deposing the authority of the text students are reading.

8.3. 3) Use a think-aloud about the text.

8.4. 4) Discussion should be initiated to help students note the features of the experience that just occurred.

9. Reciprocal Teaching

9.1. It's based on predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing.

9.2. 1) Explain to students the four reciprocal teaching comprehension strategies (listed above).

9.3. 2) Model the strategies through the use of think-alouds.

9.4. See table 6.9 for an example.

10. Role of Comprehension

10.1. Requiring the ability to think deeply and carefully and solve new problems

10.2. Strong content knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that will prepare students for college and career

10.3. Asking questions about what students read and learn builds comprehension

11. What Does it Mean to Comprehend?

11.1. Reading: an active process where you identify important ideas, evaluate them, and apply them.

11.2. Word relationships, word decoding, interpreting the literal, defining, etc.

11.3. Context: refers to when reading happens, where, and why a text is being read.

12. Question Formulation Technique

12.1. QFT Steps: produce questions, improve questions, prioritize questions, and use questions.

12.2. QFT promotes metacognition and facilitates habits of mind that will help students ask as many questions as they can.

12.3. It results in an interplay between the teacher and students.

12.4. Step 1: Establish the rules associated with the process of students generating questions and place them into groups.

12.5. Step 2: Improve questions by having students look at the questions they posed and see where they can better them.

12.6. Step 3: Prioritize questions by having students select the top three questions they came up with in their groups.

12.7. Step 4: Use questions to develop deep understanding of text/topic.

13. How to Create a Disciplinary Inquiry Classroom Culture

13.1. You must practice and foster accountable talk.

13.2. Teachers have to teach students how to read, think, ask questions, evaluate one another's thinking, and reflect on learning.

13.3. The classroom should be a place where students can ask, investigate, create, discuss, and reflect.

14. What Questions to Ask?

14.1. Convergent: involve straightforward, at times even literal, thinking and result in a single answer.

14.2. Convergent thinking emphasizes speed, accuracy, and logic whereas divergent thinking involves examining a problem from a variety of perspectives and discovering possible solutions to a given problem.

14.3. Divergent thinking is creative, and it involves multiple solutions to problems; it is aimed at generating many diverse ideas about a topic in a short amount of time.

14.4. Closed or close-ended questions elicit short, usually one-word responses whereas open or open-ended questions prompt a long response or responses.

15. Complex Questions

15.1. Students need to think about, and discuss with others, questions that examine interrelated concepts, themes, and ideas that do not have immediate or tangible answers.

15.2. They do not have just one answer. They can also be examined more than once as students build background knowledge, complex schemata, etc.

16. Questioning the Author

16.1. It's an approach to comprehension instruction that is designed to meaningfully engage students with the text and help them construct meaning from the text.

16.2. Teachers will engage students with queries that ask them to consider the meaning of the text and not just retrieve information.

16.3. Queries are used during initial reading and help students develop meaning in the course of reading. They also shift the teacher's role to discussion facilitator.

16.4. Through queries, students can examine the author's ideas and also interpret and respond to one another's ideas about the text.

16.5. Three types of queries: initiating, follow-up, and narrative.

16.6. Initiating: to help open up the discussion and help students identify the main messages or ideas presented by the author.

16.7. Follow-up: promote connections among sections of the text and also between the reader's and others' ideas about the text; they help focus and direct class discussions.

16.8. Narrative: follow and address the narrative text structure, authorship, and purpose.

17. How to Develop QTA Discussions

17.1. Marking, Turning Back, Revoicing, Modeling, Annotating, and Recapping (see table 6.8)

18. Student-Generated Questions

18.1. Question formulation involves the expression of ideas; it can lead to new ideas, more engagement, problem solving, and more responsibility for one's own learning.

18.2. Self-questioning shifts the control to the students; it gives them the responsibility to generate questions they could use to question others in class, to further discuss the topic, or questions they could raise about what they do not understand or would like to learn more about.