TEATCHER’S COMPETENCE TO COMPOSE QUESTIONS SUPPORTING STUDENTS REASONING SKILLS

Egle Säre

Egle Säre Mrs

Keywords: Teacher´s questions, critical thinking, reasoning skills, student

Abstract

Cognitive skills are important as a 21st century skills (Peterson & Bentley, 2015) and questions are a powerful tool to develop student cognitive skills including reasoning skills (Walsh & Sattes, 2011). Teachers’ competence to ask questions is associated with student’s reasoning skills and students reasoning skills are associated with the possibility to participate in group-discussions where teacher asks questions (Säre, Tulviste, & Luik, 2017). Teacher´s competence to ask quality questions in order to moderate group-discussions needs to examine, because group-discussions are very good places to develop thinking skills. The aim of this study was to find out how experienced teachers compose questions for a planned group-discussion in order to support students reasoning skills. The aim was achieved with four research questions: (1) where teacher’s skills to compose questions come from; (2) which materials teachers used to use in order to compose questions; (3) which questions teachers compose based on a text in order to develop students reasoning skills during group-discussion; (4) how teachers understand the function of questions. In this study participated 70 teachers, who attended in a pedagogical course. In sum 381 questions were analysed. Results showed that teachers composed 61% questions which mainly guided to describe the situations in text, to describe own opinion, to narrate or control the memory if the teachers were pleased to compose questions to encourage students reasoning skills. Only 39% of questions had the potential to activate higher cognitive skills assuming to support reasoning skills. Also 71% of teachers confirmed the fact that they had never studied how to compose questions. Future studies should find out which is other teachers´ competence to compose questions to support students reasoning skills who teach students in different schools and different levels. Also how to contribute to increase teacher´s competence to compose questions in order to develop students reasoning skills.

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