Approaches to Cell Biology Teaching: Questions about Questions

Abstract

Questions! Questions! Questions! When a teacher is teaching students of any age, on any topic, questions are the teacher's best friend. As a teacher, do you ask questions of your students? When do you ask questions? Are they oral questions or written questions? For what purposes do you ask questions? Do you write out in advance the questions you ask? What kinds of questions do you tend to ask? What kinds of answers do you tend to get? What do you predict would happen in your classroom if you changed the kinds of questions that you ask? How could you collect data on and analyze your questioning patterns and the impact of different kinds of questions on your students' learning? What criteria could you use to assess the effectiveness of your questions?There are many questions to be asked about the pedagogical practice of questioning. Questions provide insight into what students at any age or grade level already know about a topic, which provides a beginning point for teaching. Questions reveal misconceptions and misunderstandings that must be addressed for teachers to move student thinking forward. In a classroom discussion or debate, questions can influence behaviors, attitudes, and appreciations. They can be used to curb talkative students or draw reserved students into the discussion, to move ideas from the abstract to the concrete, to acknowledge good points made previously, or to elicit a summary or provide closure. Questions challenge students' thinking, which leads them to insights and discoveries of their own. Most important, questions are a key tool in assessing student learning. When practiced artfully, questioning can play a central role in the development of students' intellectual abilities; questions can guide thinking as well as test for it.Although many teachers carefully plan test questions used as final assessments of students' degree of experience with the course material, much less time is invested in oral questions that are interwoven in our teaching. Analysis of the kinds of questions we ask, whether they are oral or written, and the nature of the answers they elicit is even rarer. Given the important role of questions in teaching and learning, a method for collecting evidence about our own questioning strategies

Biology in Bloom: Implementing Bloom's Taxonomy to Enhance Student Learning in Biology

“…It is equally important to consider the level of information previously provided through classroom instruction i.e., if students are explicitly given an answer to an analysis question in class and then given that same question on an exam, then that question only requires recall (Allen and Tanner, 2002). We would argue that labeling of diagrams, figures, etc., cannot assess higher than application-level thinking as this question-type, at most, requires students to apply their knowledge to a new situation.…”

“…In developing the BBT, we first established a basic rubric that drew extensively on previous interpretations of Bloom's as it relates to biology (Allen and Tanner, 2002;Ebert-May et al, 2003;Yuretich, 2003;Bissell and Lemons, 2006). Through research and discussion, we agreed that the first two levels of Bloom's (knowledge and comprehension) represent lower orders of cognitive skills (Zoller, 1993).…”

“…Although Bloom's lends itself to wide application, each discipline must define the original classifications within the context of their field. In biology, Bloom's has been used to design rubrics for evaluating student performance on introductory biology exams (Bissell and Lemons, 2006), develop formative assessment questions at the appropriate cognitive level (Allen and Tanner, 2002), and inform course design (Allen and Tanner, 2007). Nonetheless, there is significant need for more comprehensive assessment tools that undergraduate biology instructors can easily use to assess student learning, guide development of teaching strategies, and promote student metacognition in the biological sciences.…”

Teaching Concepts Versus Facts in Developmental Biology

“…The conceptual understanding we want to help our students attain then becomes simply the ability to apply an idea in multiple contexts to explain and/or predict outcomes. The kinds of applications we want our students to be capable of can range from lower to higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy (Bloom et al, 1956;Allen and Tanner, 2002), depending on our learning goals.…”

Antiviral Drug Research Proposal Activity

“…Problem-based learning is considered a best practice in active learning (1). The classroom activity reported here, the Antiviral Drug Research Proposal project (ADRP), used aspects of problem-based learning to engage students in learning basic concepts of virology while practicing skills valuable to research.…”