Asking or Answering Questions: Musing over the Educational Strategy for the Future (original) (raw)
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The article for the first time in educational literature proposes that the most natural way to develop young human's brain, is through asking questions to adults from a very young age, the strategy developed and honed during the evolution of Homo sapiens through the natural selection. Asking questions in young age is indispensable for developing the human intelligence and self-confidence. Currently children stop asking questions as soon as they go to school, as current educational strategy systematically trains them to answer question, and discourage them to continue asking questions. This leads to forming a low selfreliance and inferior self-confidence of future adults. The author recommends a few concrete class strategies, and games, to encourage young students to freely ask questions. Implementation of these games and strategies are possible both in CCE, so called progressive education, as well as more traditional teacher-centered educational models. The article recommends implementing elements of a new strategy of education, based on inspiring students' natural curiosity, and encouraging their natural ability to search for knowledge.
Question asking fosters curiosity and learning in children
Children who are more curious learn more and perform better in school. Although there has been some work on how to induce curiosity in the moment, much less is known about how to promote curiosity-driven behaviors across contexts. In a preregistered experiment, 103 children ages 5-7-years-old participated in eight virtual science lessons over two weeks. Children were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to ask questions, or to a condition in which they were asked to listen carefully. At the end of training, children in the question-asking condition valued new science information significantly more than children in the listening condition. They also learned marginally more than children in the listening condition. Children with less background knowledge benefited more from question-asking practice. Our results suggest that question-asking practice can boost some aspects of curiosity and learning.
Preschoolers Use Questions as a Tool to Acquire Knowledge From Different Sources
Journal of Cognition and Development, 2010
How do children use questions as tools to acquire new knowledge? The current experiment examined preschool children's ability to direct questions to appropriate sources to acquire knowledge. Fifty preschoolers engaged in a task that entailed asking questions to discover which special key would open a box that contained a prize. Children solved simple and complex problems by questioning two puppet experts who knew about separate features of each key. Results indicate dramatic developmental differences in the efficiency and efficacy of children's questions. Although even 3-year-olds asked questions, their questions were largely ineffective and directed toward inappropriate sources. Four-year-olds directed questions toward the appropriate sources but asked approximately equal numbers of effective and ineffective questions. Only 5-year-olds both asked the appropriate sources and formulated effective questions. Implications for the development of problem-solving abilities are discussed.
Why Should We Educate For Inquisitiveness
Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology , 2016
Inquisitiveness is a paradigm example of an intellectual virtue. Despite some extensive work on the characterisation of the intellectual virtues however (e.g. Roberts and Wood, 2007; Baehr 2011) no detailed treatment of the virtue of inquisitiveness has been forthcoming in the recent literature. This paper offers a characterisation of the virtue of inquisitiveness considered within the framework of educating for intellectual virtue. As such, it presents the case in support of educating for inquisitiveness. The characterisation offered seeks to highlight in particular the distinctive relationship that inquisitiveness bears to the activity of questioning. When considered within the context of educating for intellectual virtue, this distinctive relationship is seen to have particular significance. The activity of questioning is a ubiquitous feature of everyday learning. Young children in particular are often observed to be avid question-askers and this natural tendency is manifest in a wide variety of contexts including the school classroom. There is, therefore, a natural association between inquisitiveness and learning. On this basis it is argued, the natural inclination exhibited by young children towards questioning provides us with a valuable tool in the promotion of intellectual flourishing. Moreover, the distinctive relationship that inquisitiveness bears to questioning highlights its special significance in the intellectually virtuous life in virtue of its defining role in the initiation of intellectually virtuous inquiry. Insofar as the nurturing of intellectually virtuous inquiry is a central aim of the project of educating for intellectual virtue, this places inquisitiveness centre-stage. As such, inquisitiveness is a primary intellectual virtue to educate for.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2011
To obtain reliable information, it is important to identify and effectively question knowledgeable informants. Two experiments examined how age and the ease of distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources influence children’s ability to effectively question those sources to solve problems. A sample of 3- to 5-year-olds was introduced to a knowledgeable informant contrasted with an informant who always gave inaccurate answers or one who always indicated ignorance. Children were generally better at determining which informant to question when a knowledgeable informant was contrasted with an ignorant informant than when a knowledgeable informant was contrasted with an inaccurate informant. In some cases, age also influenced the ability to determine who to question and what to ask. Importantly, in both experiments, the strongest predictor of accuracy was whether children had acquired sufficient information; successful problem solving required integrating knowledge of who to question, what to ask, and how much information to ask for.► Problem solving requires identifying reliable sources and asking good questions. ► Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds directed questions to two informants to solve problems. ► Older children were often better at determining whom to question and what to ask. ► Children were generally more successful when one informant was clearly ignorant. ► Whether children had acquired enough information predicted problem-solving success.
School: Institution where children learn the answers without asking question?
2011
The paper deals with the topic of questions and questioning as important components of information behaviour. It describes the basic starting points (the ability to ask questions is innate to man, appearing already in the 18th month, asking questions is associated with other mental functions, especially with thought processes). By analyzing the Corpus Schola2010, the state of contemporary education in terms of questioning is proven unsatisfactory: 80% of the questions are asked by teachers; the majority of the questions asked by the teacher have the character of supplemental questions and questions only activating the memory; in the classroom 3 to 4 students on average pose questionsboys slightly more often than girlsand usually just one question; 75% of students in this regard are the "silent majority" and do not ask at all. The current Czech school can be described as a place where students are served answers without posing questions themselves. This fact is discussed. Suitable measures are implied in connection with the Bloom taxonomy of educational objectives, with Vygotsky's theory of thinking, and concrete measures derived primarily from the initiative of Critical thinking: to include the practice of asking relevant questions in teacher training and to support activities of students toward asking questions. The specific activities are the subject of additional outputs of the authors -do not hesitate to contact us.
Developmental Review, 2018
Children's ability to query others is remarkable because it attests to their coordination of a range of complex cognitive capacities and because it allows them to initiate and redirect pedagogical exchanges. It is therefore a catalyst for their ability to learn from others. However, despite its importance for cognitive developmental theorizing and its implications for educational practice, relative to other aspects of children's exploratory behavior, research on children's questions has been relatively sparse and siloed across several disciplines. The aim of this review is to provide a framework for organizing past and future research on question-asking and to use this framework to describe what development and variability in children's question asking looks like between infancy and the elementary school years. We propose that question-asking can be divided into four components: (1) initiation, (2) formulation, (3) expression, and (4) response evaluation and follow-up. Drawing on research from the fields of psychology, education, and developmental psycholinguistics we review what is known and not known about these four components between infancy and elementary school as well as describe sources of variability across development.