Students’ Questions in Inquiry-Based Chemistry Classrooms

Abstract

Questioning plays an important part in the teaching and learning science. Previous research has extensively focused on teachers' questions compared to students' questions. Research of students' questions is vital as itA teacher, a prominent figure in teaching and learning process, plays a vital role in a classroom. They should be able to implement teaching approaches as suggested in the curriculum. One of teaching approaches suggested in Malaysia's chemistry curriculum specification is inquiry approach (Curriculum Development Centre, 2005). In inquiry-based classroom, the utmost importance is the questions that students ask (Wells, 1995;Martin, et al., 2009;Howes, Lim and Campos, 2009). Through the process of questioning, students are able to build a deep understanding of a concept (Suchman, 1966;Tobin, 1990; Yahudit and Herscovitz, 1999; Hinrichsen and Jarrett, 1999;Campbell, Zhang and Neilson, 2011), science Indonesian Journal of Educational Review, Vol. 4 (1), July 2017 15 process skills and nature of science (Campbell, Zhang and Neilson, 2011) as they are actively involved in the learning process.Typical classroom scenario showed that students rarely ask question as reported by Dillon (1988);Chin (2002); Blonder, Namlok-Naaman and Hofstein (2008). Not much researches were done on students' questions (van Zee et al, 2001) compared to teacher's questions. Chin and Osborne (2008) claimed that less attention was given to this aspect. Previous researches done on students' questions found that the percentage of students' questions was very low (Mohamed Najib and Mohammad Yusof, 1995;Jegede and Olajide, 1995;Tay and Mohammad Yusof, 2008). This scenario occurred due to the fact that students felt their questions were not appreciated, lack of encouragement by their teachers and they were not given sufficient time to think (Rop, 2003). However, Albergaria-Almedia (2010) found that students asked ample number of questions in chemistry classroom that they observed. Nevertheless, questions asked by the students were mainly not related to chemistry content. In Malaysia, there will be a revamp in the examination questions which focuses more on questions which requires higher order thinking questions to ensure that Malaysia's performance improved in the next TIMSS and PISA cycle as stated in Preliminary Report-Executive Summary National Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (Ministry of Education, 2012). Hence, it is of utmost importance to study students' questions to get an insight view of their thinking. There should be a difference in the type of questions asked by students in traditional and inquiry-based classroom. Thus, this study looks into the type of questions asked by students in inquiry-based chemistry classrooms.As inquiry-based teaching is a student-centred approach (Kim, Tan and Talaue, 2013), students are expected to be active in the learning process. It means that students should be involved in the process of responding to questions asked by other student(s). Furthermore, students should be able t...