Qwizdom Blog

The Question Cycle

In a excerpt from ‘Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology’, authors  Ian D. Beatty & William J. Gerace talk about the Question Cycle:

The Question Cycle

The four principles of TEFA are general and flexible by design, so that they may productively guide instruction in almost any circumstance. To help teachers implement the principles, TEFA specifies a particular, tangible pattern of classroom activity called the question cycle (introduced in Dufresne et al. 1996). It is an iterative cycle of question posing, answering, and discussing, aided by CRS technology, that forms a scaffold for structuring whole-class interaction.

The essential phases of the cycle are:

1. Pose a question or problem to the students, generally challenging, often multifaceted. (In TEFA, we do not teach first and then ask questions about what was taught; we ask questions first, and use them as a context for sense-making and direct instruction.)
2. Have students wrestle with the question—alone, in small groups, or both in succession—and decide upon a response.
3. Use a CRS to collect responses (even from students who are uncertain) and display a chart of the aggregated responses.
4. Elicit from students as many different reasons and justifications for the chosen responses as possible, without revealing which (if any) is (or are) correct. In the process, draw out students’ reasoning and vocabulary, expose them to each others’ ideas, and make implicit assumptions explicit.
5. Develop a student-dominated discussion of the assumptions, perceptions, ideas, and arguments involved. Help students formulate their ideas and practice talking science, find out why they think what they do, and gently increase their understanding. (In practice, phases 4 and 5 usually blend together.)
6. Provide a summary, micro-lecture, meta-level comments, segue to another question, or whatever other closure seems warranted, informed by the detailed data just obtained on students’ thinking. (The class should now be well primed to receive the message, appreciate its relevance, and integrate it with other knowledge.

Posted in Education by Ed Morgan on July 28, 2010.