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Student-generatedquestions: A meaningfulaspect of learning in scienceChristine Chin & David E. BrownPublished online: 26 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Christine Chin & David E. Brown (2002) Student-generatedquestions: A meaningful aspect of learning in science, International Journal ofScience Education, 24:5, 521-549, DOI: 10.1080/09500690110095249

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Student-generated questions: a meaningful aspect oflearning in science

Christine Chin, National Institute of Education, Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity, Singapore; David E. Brown, College of Education, Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Bertram C. Bruce, Graduate School ofLibrary and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

This study was conducted to (a) identify the types of questions that students ask during science learn-ing, (b) explicate the role of students’ questions in the knowledge construction process, particularly ineducational discourse, (c) investigate the relationship between students’ questions and approaches tolearning and (d) discuss some emergent issues related to student questioning. Six Grade 8 students wereobserved during class activities, and interviewed before and after instruction about related scienceconcepts. Students’ questions included basic information (factual and procedural) questions whichwere typical of a surface learning approach, and wonderment (comprehension, prediction, anomalydetection, application, and planning) questions which were indicative of a deep approach. Unlikewonderment questions which stimulated the students to hypothesize, predict, thought-experimentand generate explanations, basic information questions generated little productive discussion.Problem-solving activities elicited more and a wider range of wonderment questions than teacher-directed activities. Although the students did not always ask wonderment questions spontaneously,they were able to generate such questions when prompted to do so.

‘True learning is characterised not so much by the answering of questions as by theasking of them’ (UNESCO 1980).

Students’ questions

Questioning lies at the heart of scientific inquiry and meaningful learning.Question generation is an important cognitive strategy as the act of ‘composingquestions’ focuses the attention of students on content, main ideas, and checking ifcontent is understood (King 1994, Rosenshine et al. 1996). The value of student-generated questions in science learning has been emphasized by authors such asBiddulph et al. (1986) and White and Gunstone (1992). Students’ questions play asignificant role in meaningful learning and motivation and can serve differentfunctions for them. These include confirmation of an expectation, resolution ofan unexpected puzzle, and filling a recognized knowledge gap (Biddulph andOsborne 1982). Student questioning, particularly at the higher cognitive levels,is also an essential aspect of problem-solving (Zoller 1987, Pizzini and Shepardson1991).

International Journal of Science Education ISSN 0950–0693 print/ISSN 1464–5289 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09500690110095249

INT. J. SCI. EDUC., 2002, VOL. 24, NO. 5, 521–549

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Besides helping students learn, student questioning can also guide teachers intheir work. Questions indicate that students have been thinking about the ideaspresented and have been trying to extend and link them with other things theyknow. They can also reveal much about the quality of students’ thinking andconceptual understanding (White and Gunstone 1992, Woodward 1992, Watts,Gould et al. 1997), their alternative frameworks and confusion about variousconcepts (Maskill and Pedrosa de Jesus 1997a), their reasoning (Donaldson1978), and what they want to know (Elstgeest 1985). Watts et al. (1997a) haveeven suggested that powerful students’ questions can provoke critical incidents forscience teachers, forge critical reflection about the nature of science and the pro-cesses of teaching and learning, and generate shifts in their thinking and classroompractice.

A hallmark of self-directed, reflective learners is their ability to ask themselvesquestions that help direct their learning. These questions could be those pertainingto science content of interest, or evaluative questions that help the learners monitorthe status of their understanding. Self-questioning provides learners with a way totest themselves, to help them check how well they are comprehending what theyare studying (Wong 1985). It is a source of feedback that helps students redirecttheir use of learning strategies. Thus, the effectiveness of self-questioning is attrib-uted to both its cognitive and metacognitive functions. Self-questioning is alsoconsistent with the view of generative learning (Osborne and Wittrock 1983,1985) as learners try to reconcile their prior knowledge and new information intheir attempts to make sense of these ideas.

Question production, particularly of ‘thinking’ or more probing questions, isnot a usual student role. Dillon (1988) found, in observational studies of class-rooms, that students asked remarkably few questions, and even fewer in search ofknowledge. Few students spontaneously ask high quality thinking questions(White and Gunstone 1992: 170). According to the latter authors, the commonexperience of teachers is that their first attempts at question production strategieswith students result in a large proportion of purely factual questions. Closedquestions, that is, those with a single, unambiguous answer, are more common;and open, imaginative questions that require reflection and understanding, both toframe and to answer, are rare. Closed questions and those requiring recall ofinformation are easier to generate. They are thus more commonly asked thanquestions requiring deep processing of ideas, such as those involving a reframing,application, or extension of taught ideas.

Woodward (1992) proffered some reasons for the apparent paucity of student-generated questions in science classes. For example, teachers who feel unsure oftheir own knowledge base may tactically avoid or repress students’ questions toavoid problematic issues. Similarly, teachers who were subjected to a didactic,knowledge-based approach during their own experiences as students, who inter-pret science teaching as transmission of facts, and who feel that tight control is anecessary feature of teaching, are also unlikely to invite students’ questions. Goodet al. (1987) and Wood and Wood (1988) have shown how teacher control ofquestioning constantly encourages student passivity. Dillon (1988) has also sug-gested that students may also fear negative reactions from classmates and theteacher, and that systemic conditions (structures of the school, relations betweenadults and students, socialization into institutional and situational authority roles)may also inhibit student questioning.

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Questions can be classified according to the level of thought required foranswering them. The most common hierarchy is Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al.1956) which includes knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis,and evaluation. Pizzini and Shepardson (1991) categorized the cognitive level ofstudents’ questions as one of three types: input, processing, or output. Inputquestions require students to recall information or derive it from sense data, pro-cessing-level questions demand students to draw relationships among data, andhigher-level output questions require students to go beyond the data in new waysto hypothesize, speculate, generalize, create, and evaluate.

The number and type of questions that students ask may be influenced bytheir age, experiences, prior knowledge, and skills, the attitude of the teacher,teaching style, nature of the topics, reward structure, classroom evaluative climate,and social interaction patterns (Biddulph and Osborne 1982). Furthermore, inter-esting and productive answers are dependent upon being able to first come up withgood questions for eliciting them (Shodell 1995). Low levels of questioning andexplanation on the part of students have been found to be correlated with lowerachievement (Tisher 1977).

Research on student-generated questions

Compared to the literature on teacher questioning (e.g., Rowe 1987, Tobin 1987,Blosser 1995), there has been relatively little research on students’ questions.Dillon (1988) suggested that this dearth is not because there is lack of interest inthe topic, but rather that ‘investigators can scarcely find any student questions’ andthat children may be raising questions in their own minds, or asking questions oftheir friends, but not aloud in the classroom. This paucity of student questioninghas been documented over time and in different settings (e.g., Elstgeest 1985,Graesser and Person 1994, Commeyras 1995).

Most of the research on student-generated questions has been on text-basedquestions and the effects of self-questioning on prose-processing in reading (e.g.,Wong 1985), mainly in domains other than science. Studies of text-based ques-tioning in science (e.g., Koch and Eckstein 1991, Pearson 1991) have typicallyfocused on the reading comprehension of texts. For example, Koch andEckstein (1991) found that there was improvement in college physics students’reading comprehension when they were taught the skill of formulating questionsabout textual material. This strategy stimulated students’ awareness of theirdifficulties in reading comprehension and could be used as a self-monitoringtechnique.

Scardamalia and Bereiter (1992) distinguished between two types of student-generated questions, text-based and knowledge-based, produced under differentconditions. Text-based questions are questions to which students ask as part oftheir study of a text, typically when they are specifically instructed to generatequestions in response to certain cues. Knowledge-based questions, in contrast,occur spontaneously and spring from a deep interest of the student or arise froman effort to make sense of the world. The source of questions is a gap or discre-pancy in the student’s knowledge or a desire to extend knowledge in some direc-tion. The above authors found that knowledge-based questions, which thestudents generated before studying the topic ‘endangered species’ and whichreflected things that they genuinely wondered about, were of a higher order

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than text-based questions produced after exposure to text materials. These ques-tions were significantly superior in their potential contribution to knowledge, intheir focus on explanations and causes instead of facts, in requiring more integra-tion of complex and divergent information, and in being more interesting. Thesedifferences point to greater educational potential for questions produced under theknowledge-based condition, and suggest that different kinds of questions candirect the learning process to different extents. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1992)also found that students asked mainly ‘basic information’ questions for a lessfamiliar topic but concentrated on ‘wonderment questions’ which reflect curiosity,puzzlement, scepticism, or a knowledge-based speculation for a more familiartopic.

Relatively less research has been done on non-text-based questions. One earlystudy (Hartford and Good 1982) found that teaching chemistry high schoolstudents questioning skills led them to ask more and better research questions.However, students’ questioning skills were found to be independent of their levelof Piagetian intellectual development, involving probabilistic, combinatorial andproportional reasoning, and the isolation and control of variables. The authorssuggested that research questioning ability might depend upon hypothetico-deductive reasoning ability rather than upon the various types of formal opera-tional thought. More recent studies into student-generated questions have focusedon different aspects such as the nature of these questions (Watts and Alsop 1995,Watts, Gould et al. 1997), the characteristics and influence of students’ questionson investigative tasks (Keys 1998), the use of students’ questions as indicators oftheir learning problems (Maskill and Pedrosa de Jesus 1997a), as an alternativeevaluation tool (Dori and Herscovitz 1999), and the difficulty that students have inasking questions about abstract concepts (Olsher and Dreyfus 1999).

Watts and Alsop (1995) found that students’ questions about energy, heat, andlight (obtained through individual interviews, whole class work, and group dis-cussions) were diagnostic of the state of students’ thinking, revealed their frames ofreference and unorthodox understanding of science, and were indicative of theroutes through which students were seeking understanding. Watts et al. (1997b)discussed three categories of students’ questions which were seen to illuminatedistinct periods in the process of conceptual change: consolidation questionswhere students attempted to confirm explanations and consolidate understandingof new ideas in science; exploration questions where they sought to expand knowl-edge and test constructs; and elaboration questions where students attempted toexamine claims and counterclaims, reconcile different understandings, resolveconflicts, test circumstances, track in and around the ideas and their consequences.

Keys (1998) found that, when Grade 6 students worked in groups to generatetheir own questions for open-ended science investigations, they pursued two mainavenues of ideas for questions: varying the teacher-directed activity and inventingquestions from their own imaginations. The former types of questions essentiallyrepeated the activity, but changed one or more of the variables, while the latteroriginal questions arose from students’ ideas about previous science lessons andpersonal experiences from everyday life. Students’ questions determined the depthand breadth of the concepts to be learnt, the scientific processes to be used, and thecognitive difficulty of the investigation tasks. Allowing students to generate theirown investigation questions stimulated curiosity and encouraged profound think-ing about relationships among questions, tests, evidence, and conclusions.

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Maskill and Pedrosa de Jesus (1997a) obtained information about Grade 9science students’ learning problems on temperature, energy, heat, and kinetictheory by having the teacher stop the lessons from time to time and requestingthe students to write down any questions they wished about problems or difficul-ties they were having. The questions were a good source of information about eachspecific moment of the lesson and provided the teacher with a great deal of infor-mation with which to organize future teaching according to the students’ needs.The results also showed that the students did have meaningful questions and wereable to ask them. In the study by Dori and Herscovitz (1999), Grade 10 sciencestudents were required to pose questions while practising a variety of learningactivities. The students’ question-posing capability was then evaluated by usingpre- and post-test questionnaires where the students were presented with a casestudy and asked to compose as many questions as they could about the case theyhad read. There was a significant increase in students’ question-posing capability(as indicated by the total number, orientation, and complexity of questions) at allacademic levels of achievement. The findings also showed that question-posingcapability can be used as a means of evaluating higher-order thinking, and indicatethe potential of question-posing as a viable evaluation tool that offers an alternativeto conventional evaluation methods.

Although the above studies show that students are able to ask meaningfulquestions that drive their learning, the study by Olsher and Dreyfus (1999)found that the number of questions that junior high school students could askabout abstract concepts and ‘black box’ molecular biochemical processes was lim-ited compared to questions pertaining to the clarification of terms or whichreferred to the human and social aspects of the uses of biotechnologies.However, the students were able to ask questions relevant to the processes atlater stages of the lesson after some intense scaffolding. The authors concludedthat given their rudimentary knowledge, junior-high school students could not beexpected to spontaneously ask these questions and first had to learn the types ofquestions that one should ask about these processes.

The above literature review indicates that there is substantial educationalpotential in student-generated questions beyond that envisaged by research ontext-based questions where the focus is on developing comprehension strategies.Rather, students’ questions can be used to direct their inquiry and guide construc-tion of knowledge. Also, researchers studying classroom questions have adopteddifferent paradigms. Until recently, most studies (such as those concerned withtext-based questioning) have adopted a process-product approach, typically com-paring the effects of an intervention with a comparison group and focusing onstudent achievement. Others, although fewer in number, have used a sociolinguis-tic approach which emphasizes the interactional nature of classroom discourse andsocial contexts (Carlsen 1991). The latter author has suggested that three featuresof questions (viz. context, content, and the responses and reactions by speakers)can be considered in sociolinguistic research on classroom questioning which canaddress the dynamics and active construction of meaning that the process-productparadigm is unable to consider. Context includes the description of speakers andtheir relationships to one another, as well as description of the ways utterances bydifferent speakers fit together in discourse. Content refers to what is being talkedabout and the subject matter knowledge. The sociolinguistic approach, however,commands a high price in time investment for production of detailed transcripts,

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subject-matter knowledge on the part of the researcher, and increased complexityof analysis. Consequently, they are rare in science education. Carlsen (1991) alsoencouraged researchers to look at ways of integrating the two paradigms whichmight productively inform each other.

Background to the problem and purpose of study

The few studies of student-generated questions have focused primarily on thoseproduced individually by students and in written form. Although earlier studiestypically related to questions based on reading texts, more recent research haslooked at student questioning in hands-on inquiry settings which are very muchan advocated and integral aspect of science teaching and learning. The results ofthese studies show that students’ questions are productive in directing their learn-ing. Little research, however, has been done to investigate how students’ questionsrelate to the construction of their conceptual knowledge, and how the use of suchquestions contributes to educational discourse, in a naturalistic setting. It is thus ofinterest to study how questions, produced both individually and in a group setting,scaffold and interact in students’ collaborative inquiry and the process of knowl-edge construction.

In light of the above, more information about the nature of student-generatedquestions will provide a better understanding of how such questions play a role ineducational discourse in both individual and collaborative learning, as well asilluminate important issues regarding student questioning in such contexts. Thisinformation will also extend our understanding of how teachers can incorporatethe use of students’ questions in their teaching and how they can tailor theirinstruction to cater to individual differences in learning approaches.Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to (a) identify the types of questionsthat students ask during science learning, (b) explicate the role of students’ ques-tions in the knowledge construction process, particularly in educational discoursein small-group collaborative settings, (c) investigate the relationship betweenstudents’ questions and approaches to learning and (d) discuss some issues relatedto student questioning.

Our earlier study (Chin and Brown 2000a), which compared the differencesbetween a deep and surface approach in learning science, found that among otherthings, there were differences in the nature of questions that students asked whenthey adopted a deep versus surface approach to learning science. A model (Chinand Brown 2000b) was also postulated of how the asking of questions, togetherwith several other learning strategies, might interact to bring about a deepapproach in learning science when students enter a ‘depth dynamic’. The presentstudy extends this work by looking specifically at student-generated questions inmore detail. In particular, this study investigates how students’ questions help toscaffold learning during the sense-making and knowledge construction process,and discusses implications of student questioning for science instruction based onsome emergent issues.

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Design and methods

Selection of students and the classroom context

A case study approach (Merriam 1988, Stake 1995) was used, involving detailedinvestigation of six Grade 8 target students from a school in a mid-western uni-versity town in the US. As one of the aims of this study was to relate the nature ofstudents’ questions to their learning approaches, this design was considered appro-priate as it would allow us to track selected individual students over a period oftime. Furthermore, a focus on a few target students instead of a large sample ofstudents would enable us to obtain rich, in-depth, data from classroom discoursein small-group settings for subsequent fine-grained analysis. These six targetstudents, who were from the same class, were selected in consultation with theirscience teacher. They represented learners of different academic abilities as well asthose typically using learning approaches ranging from deep to surface, as identi-fied by the Learning Approach Questionnaire and their teacher’s evaluation oftheir school work. The Learning Approach Questionnaire was used to select thestudents as part of a larger study; it measured students’ tendency to learn mean-ingfully using a deep approach or by rote using a surface approach. Details of thedescription and use of this questionnaire are given in Chin and Brown (2000a). Itwas important that the teacher’s evaluation matched the students’ scores on theLearning Approach Questionnaire to ensure validity in the choice of students.Other selection criteria included: good attendance, being verbally expressive andon-task, having at least average success in science, and having the ability to workwell with each other.

The science class was observed during the instruction of a chemistry unitwhich lasted 9 weeks. The teacher was very experienced, having taught formany years. Laboratory hands-on activities were often done where studentsworked in small groups. The six target students worked in two groups of threeduring their class activities. The group assignment was done by the teacher who, inthe past, had experienced greater success with same-sex groups. The boys’ groupconsisted of Rick, Quin and Carl while the girls’ group comprised Mary, Bess, andDale (all pseudonyms). Rick and Mary were identified independently by both theLearning Approach Questionnaire and by the teacher as meaningful learners whoused a predominantly deep learning approach, Carl and Dale as rote learners whotypically used a more surface approach, while Quin and Bess used an approach thatlay somewhere between a deep and surface approach. Rick and Mary were ‘A’grade students, Quin and Bess were ‘B’ grade students and Carl and Dale were ‘C’grade students. Often, the students used a combination of both approaches whichdepended on contextual influences.

The topics covered in the chemistry unit included the nature of matter (ele-ments, mixtures, compounds, atoms and molecules), states of matter and changesof state, physical and chemical changes, acids and bases. Instructional activitiesincluded teacher presentation of topics, hands-on activities, whole class discus-sions, and homework assignments based on end-of-chapter questions from thetextbook. Most of the hands-on activities followed a similar sequence of events:(a) a class discussion in which the purpose of the activity was introduced, theprocedures described, and safety precautions pointed out, (b) student participationin the hands-on activity in groups, (c) teacher circulating among the groups to

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facilitate learning and (d) students writing their own laboratory reports or record-ing their results and answering questions in teacher designed worksheets. Duringclass discussions, the teacher often asked questions to find out the students’ ideasabout the topic in question. The students were also encouraged to ask questionsand voice their ideas.

Activities

The seven hands-on laboratory activities for which students worked in smallgroups are described below. Except for the first activity on the separation ofa salt-sand mixture, the students were given verbal procedures for the otheractivities.

Separation of salt-sand mixture. This was an open-ended problem-solving activitywhere no instructions or step-by-step procedure were given. The students had todevise a method for separating a mixture of salt and sand. The apparatus andmaterials provided included the salt-sand mixture, beakers, an aluminium foilpan, a ring stand, a filter funnel, filter paper and an alcohol burner. Studentscould also request any other materials available in the laboratory that they needed.

Qualitative analysis: identification of unknown mixtures. Using a chemplate (a traywith wells containing different substances), the students first studied the effects ofheat, adding iodine and vinegar on samples of flour, baking soda, sugar, salt andcornstarch. They recorded all their observations in a reaction table. Then thestudents were given 12 separate mixtures and asked to identify the unknowns inthese mixtures containing combinations of flour, baking soda, sugar, salt andcornstarch.

Boiling point lab. The students heated water containing ice over a hot-plate andnoted the temperature at 30s intervals. They continued doing this until the waterhad boiled for 4 min. Then they repeated the activity but with salt added to the ice-water mixture. For this activity, the students were given the procedure orally, butthe purpose of the activity was not explicitly explained to them. The students hadto write their laboratory reports individually, formulating their own problem state-ments, describing the procedure in their own words, and recording their observa-tions and results obtained. They also had to plot and compare the temperaturegraphs for plain water and salt water. A list of questions was also provided and thestudents had to write their answers to these. The questions pertained to the shapeof the temperature curve, the effect of adding salt on the freezing and boilingpoints of water, and the arrangement of the molecules in the solid, liquid, andgaseous phases.

Chromatography . The students used paper chromatography to separate the dyes inthe ink from different coloured marker pens. They also had to calculate the reten-tion factor (Rf ) for each dye. This was obtained by dividing the distance thecoloured dye moved by the distance the solvent moved, measured from the origin.

Crime lab chemistry. The students role-played crime laboratory detectives usingpaper chromatography to solve a kidnapping case. They had to determine which of

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ten different black pens belonging to ten different suspects was used to write aransom note. They prepared a chromatogram using ink from each pen type andcompared it to a chromatogram containing ink from the ransom note to identifythe pen that was used. From this result, they identified the ‘guilty suspect’.

Chemical change: reaction between zinc and dilute hydrochloric acid. This activitywas performed as an illustration of a chemical change. The teacher gave a demon-stration on how to carry out the activity and pointed out the ‘popping’ explosivesound of hydrogen when the flame of a burning splint was held over the mouth of atest tube containing hydrochloric acid and zinc. Then she wrote the chemicalequation of the reaction on the board and explained it to the class. After the teacherdemonstration, the students performed the activity individually in their groups.

Acids and bases. The students were required to determine if some common house-hold substances were acidic, basic, or neutral. They first used cabbage juice asindicator, and then repeated the experiment using blueberry juice. The substancestested were vinegar, baking soda, water, salt water, ammonia, aspirin, tummytablets (antacid), alcohol, bleach, Coca-Cola, coffee, mouthwash and lemonjuice. To each test tube containing 30 drops of the indicator, the students addedone of the given substances dropwise until there was a colour change or until 30drops had been added. They then recorded the number of drops added. Afteradding the indicator to all the substances, the students grouped the substancesby colour and arranged them according to their colour intensity. They had todetermine if each substance was neutral, an acid, or a base. They also had to figureout the degree of acidity or basicity of the substance by comparing the number ofdrops of indicator added. No colour comparison pH chart was provided.

Procedure

The boys were audio-taped and the girls were video-taped (as only one videocamera was available) while engaged in science hands-on activities during theirregular science classes and they were encouraged to think aloud and to verbalizetheir thoughts. Fieldnotes were taken based on classroom observations whichfocused on classroom discourse and science activities. The target students werealso interviewed individually after instruction of the chemistry unit using a semi-structured interview protocol to find out more about their ideas and understandingof the science concepts in this unit. The interviews were audio-taped. In addition,stimulated recall was used to obtain further information about how the studentstackled the tasks and what they were thinking of while engaged in the laboratoryactivities. This provided information about silent thoughts which were not alwaysverbalized and captured on tape. For example, the students would be given adescription or narration of a critical episode or quote from a segment of the tapepertaining to a specific activity and asked to elaborate on what they were thinkingof regarding what they did or said. They were also asked about any ideas, predic-tions, observation, explanations, and questions that they had before, during, andafter doing the activities. The use of verbal data from such individual or smallgroup ‘think aloud’ protocols has been used widely in research on cognition andhas been considered a suitable means of studying students’ thought processes(Ericsson and Simon 1993). The use of stimulated recall in uncovering covert

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cognitive processes not observable by either on-site observation or videotape view-ing has also been suggested in studying students’ thinking (Peterson et al. 1982,Garner 1988).

Questions asked by students may occur either spontaneously or in response tocertain cues. Those that were asked spontaneously during the hands-on activitieswould be captured on tape during the course of the activities. However, somequestions may not be verbalized and would thus not be recorded. To find out ifthe target students had other questions that were not verbalized during the activ-ities and to maximize the documentation of these questions, three other methodswere used. First, the students were asked to write down any questions they had athome, as part of a learning journal after doing the activities, particularly aboutthings that puzzled them. However, since writing questions was not an activityrequired by the teacher for all the students in the class, some of the target studentsdid not take this seriously; they saw this as having more homework and thus didnot write their journals for most of the activities. Only Rick and Carl wrote ques-tions for the boiling point and chromatography activities. Second, the teacher setaside time during the lesson for the students in class to write down questions thatthey had pertaining to the boiling point activity. However, she did not incorporatethis exercise for the other lessons. Third, during the post-instructional interviews,the students were asked if they had any questions pertaining to the hands-onactivities.

Data analysis

Data from multiple sources (fieldnotes, transcripts of classroom discourse from theaudiotapes and videotapes, audio-taped interviews with the students, and students’written work) were analysed in relation to each other; this served to triangulate thedata and to help enhance the credibility of the findings and assertions made(Lincoln and Guba 1985, Stake 1995). For example, the interview responsesthat students gave during stimulated recall about their thinking during thehands-on activities were compared with segments of transcripts that correspondedto classroom discourse to check for congruence. Observation fieldnotes used assecondary data sources provided a context for the interpretation of data. The targetstudents’ taped interviews and discourse during class activities were transcribedverbatim and subsequently analysed. Transcribed discourse from the videotapeswas also supplemented with descriptive notes obtained by viewing the videotapesto obtain information about what the students did during the laboratory activities.

To identify the types of questions that students asked, the interview and groupdiscourse transcripts were analysed using an iterative process. The transcriptswere read through several times to search for the kinds of questions asked bythe students. Coding categories (Bogdan and Biklen 1992) were then developedby making annotated descriptive and interpretive comments in the margins of thetranscripts each time a question was documented. The categories of questions werepartly inductive and partly derived from prior theoretical commitments based onthe existing literature of questions that students asked. These became the tentativecoding categories. Subsequent transcript segments containing questions were thenannotated with the appropriate code. In developing the coding categories, it wasimportant that they could be operationalized and substantiated in the context ofthe data. A constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss 1967) was used to

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cluster the codes into progressively more inclusive categories forming a hierarch-ical taxonomy or working typologies. This resulted in a coding scheme of twomajor codes (basic information and wonderment questions) with each consistingof further subtypes of questions. Frequency counts of these various types of ques-tions that the students asked while carrying out the activities were also computed.To analyse the role that these questions played in educational discourse, sub-sequent segments of the transcript following the questions were scrutinized tostudy the evolution and progress of students’ thinking and actions during theirknowledge construction process. Assertions were made based on patterns observedwhich were grounded in the data.

Results

The types of questions that the students asked are first presented. Following this,examples of students’ questions arising from the hands-on activities are given,together with a more detailed analysis of the discourse and the responses elicitedby these questions. In the excerpts of discourse that follow, the questions ofinterest are italicized, [ . . . ] means a pause of 3s or less.

Types of questions

Two broad types of questions may be distinguished; namely, basic informationquestions and wonderment questions, based on the categorization by Scardamaliaand Bereiter (1992). Inductive analysis of the data produced two further subtypesof basic information questions: factual and procedural. Factual questions usuallyrequired only recall of information and were often closed questions. They typicallyrelated to information in the textbook or some simple observation made about anevent, such as ‘What does the dictionary say about salt?’ and ‘What colour is that?Blue?’. Procedural questions sought clarification about a given procedure or askedhow a task was to be carried out. They were asked particularly when step-by-stepinstructions had been given. Examples include ‘Did she [teacher] say to put it in apan?’ and ‘Could we pour this out now?’.

Wonderment questions were pitched at a conceptually higher level, requiredan application or extension of taught ideas, and focused on predictions, explana-tions, and causes instead of facts, or on resolving discrepancies and gaps in knowl-edge. They were asked when students tried to relate new and existing knowledgeor build internal associations among different aspects of the new knowledge intheir efforts to understand. Because they required integration of complex anddivergent information from various sources, and reflected curiosity, puzzlement,scepticism or speculation, they had a greater potential contribution for an advance-ment in conceptual understanding. Wonderment questions included (a) compre-hension questions which typically sought an explanation of something notunderstood, (b) prediction questions of the ‘What would happen if . . . ‘ varietyinvolving some speculation or hypothesis-verification, (c) anomaly detection ques-tions where the student expressed scepticism or detected some discrepant informa-tion or cognitive conflict and sought to address this anomalous data, (d) applicationquestions in which the student wondered of what use was the information that heor she was dealing with and (e) planning or strategy questions where the studentwas temporarily stuck and wondered how best to proceed next when no prior

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procedure had been given. These categories of wonderment questions, derivedfrom inductive analysis of the data, are not exhaustive but include most of thecommon questions that students usually asked.

Table 1 shows the relative frequencies of the different types of questions thatthe six students asked during five of the activities in class (viz. separation of salt-sand mixture, boiling point lab, chromatography, acids and bases, and zinc-hydro-chloric acid chemical reaction). The other two activities on ‘qualitative analysis ofunknown mixtures’ and ‘crime lab chemistry’ were omitted from this analysis fortwo reasons. First, two of the students (Bess and Dale) were absent during each ofthese activities, so complete data for all the six students were unavailable forcomparison. Second, analysis of the transcripts of these two activities showedmuch procedural talk with few questions, most of which were pitched at theprocedural level, and little talk at the conceptual level. Because this pattern ofpredominance of questions at the basic information level was also characteristicof the other five activities, including further information from these two additionalactivities would contribute little extra information beyond what was already avail-able for the five activities. Even though these two activities ‘qualitative analysis ofunknown mixtures’ and ‘crime lab chemistry’ appear to be problem-solving innature, they only required low inferential thinking by the students where theycompared their unknowns with given standards in a routine, mechanistic manner.

As can be seen from table 1, most of the questions that the students askedduring the hands-on activities were generally not of a conceptually high level thatwere manifestations of deep thinking. There were 190 basic information questionsand only 30 wonderment questions of a more reflective nature. Wonderment ques-tions comprised only 14% of all the questions asked. The majority of the questionsrelated to procedural tasks of the activity, such as clarifying and checking what todo. Of the 190 basic information questions, 48 were factual and 142 were proce-dural questions. That is, of the total 220 questions asked, 65% were proceduralquestions. Among the 30 wonderment questions, half (15) were comprehensionquestions which focused on explanations and an understanding of events orphenomena. Most of these wonderment questions were asked during three ofthe activities, namely separation of salt-sand mixture, boiling point lab and chro-matography. For both the boys’ and girls’ groups combined, there were a total of

532 C. CHIN ET AL.

Table 1. Types and frequencies of questions asked by students duringhands-on activities.

Types of questions

Activity Basic Wonderment Total % Wonderment

Separation of salt-sand mixture 40 17 57 30Boiling point lab 61 7 68 10Chromatography 32 4 36 11Acids and bases 52 1 53 2Zinc-HCl chemical reaction 5 1 6 17

Total 190a 30b 220 14

Notea Of the 190 basic information questions, 48 were factual and 142 were procedural.b Of the 30 wonderment questions 15 were comprehension questions.

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17 wonderment questions for the separation of salt-sand mixture activity, seven forthe boiling point activity, four for the chromatography, and only one each for theacids and bases and zinc-hydrochloric acid chemical reaction activities. The per-centage of wonderment questions relative to the total number of questions askedwas highest (30%) for the activity on separation of a salt-sand mixture. Notably,this was the only activity which was open-ended and problem-solving in naturewhere the students were not given step-by-step instructions on how to carry outthe task. Of particular mention also, was the activity on zinc-hydrochloric acidchemical reaction which gave rise to an extremely low number of both basic andwonderment questions. This activity was carried out more in the form of anillustration or a verification rather than in the spirit of inquiry.

The number and types of questions asked by the individual students aresummarized in table 2. The wonderment questions were asked mainly by Bess,Quin, Rick, and Mary. For the five activities combined, Bess asked 10 questions;Quin, eight; Rick, six; Mary, four; Carl one; and Dale, one. Some of the ideasarticulated by these students (particularly Rick and Mary) that were at a higherconceptual level were not necessarily in the form of questions, but rather as com-ments in the form of predictions or self-explanations. As shown in table 2, won-derment questions comprised an average of 20% of all the questions that Rick,Quin, and Bess asked. That is, they each asked about four basic informationquestions to every one wonderment question. In contrast, the percentage of won-derment to total questions asked was relatively low for Carl (3%) and Dale (6%).Even Mary, who often used deep learning strategies such as creating analogies,hypothesizing, predicting, generating explanations, invoking personal experiencesand applying prior knowledge to new situations (see Chin and Brown 2000a, b),asked comparatively few wonderment questions (8%). Interestingly, Good et al.(1987) found that average achievers (cf. Bess and Quin) asked more questions thanlow and high achievers.

Basic information questions

Basic information questions were typically either ignored or simply respondedto with a short, simple answer without leading to further conceptual talk. The

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Table 2. Questions asked by individual studentsduring hands-on activities.

Types of questions

Student Basic Wonderment Total % Wonderment

BoysRick 24 6 30 20Quin 30 8 38 21Carl 31 1 32 3

GirlsMary 47 4 51 8Bess 42 10 52 19Dale 16 1 17 6

Total 190 30 220 14

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following segment is from the activity where the students used cabbage juiceindicator to determine if several given substances were acids or bases.

Quin: How are you going to measure 30 [drops of indicator]?Rick: Alright, I’ll show you. You do this. . .Carl: How many drops did you put in?Quin: . . . 6, 7 . . . [ignoring Carl and counting the number of drops to himself]Carl: 30?Quin: . . . 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 . . .Carl: You put in 30?Quin: . . . 19, 20, 21 . . . .Rick: What is the stuff that you put in?Carl: Put what? Put what stuff? Rick, go and ask her [teacher] . . . .

(Rick left to look for the teacher.)

Quin: Almost done. And what are we supposed to do next?Carl: Add some stuff that Rick is getting.Quin: How much are we supposed to [add]?Carl: . . . Put them in till it changes colour.

(Rick returned and started to add aspirin to one of the test tubes.)

Carl: Hold on, what are you putting in?Rick: This is aspirin . . . Well, there it goes. It’s changing colour.Carl: It’s purple . . . How many did you put in? . . .Rick: Five drops.Quin: Label the aspirin. So we put aspirin in each one [test tube]?Rick: No.

The students then tested ammonia solution, Coca-Cola, mouthwash, bleach, alco-hol, lemon juice, baking soda and water with the cabbage juice indicator. The firstauthor [hereafter referred to as CC], who observed the lessons, decided to ask theboys what sense they were making out of their observations.

CC: Why do you think the solutions are changing colour?Quin: I don’t know . . . chemicals mixing.Carl: The different chemicals, they are just reacting.

Most of the talk during this activity was procedural and centred on tasks involvedwith recording the colour changes and noting the number of drops of solutionadded. The excerpt shows that basic information (factual and procedural) ques-tions had little effect on students’ subsequent cognitive behaviours, and engen-dered little productive discourse. When CC tried to find out if Quin and Carl knewwhy the solutions changed colours, their responses suggested that they had beenmerely following the teacher’s instructions without understanding much of whatwas happening.

Wonderment questions

Unlike the basic information questions, wonderment questions tended to elicitresponses that were of a more conceptual nature. The three activities, namely,separation of a salt-sand mixture, boiling point lab, and chromatography will beused as illustrative cases as most of the wonderment questions were asked duringthese activities. The questions pertaining to the boiling point and chromatographyactivities that the students asked during the in-class question-writing session andpost-instructional interviews will also be discussed.

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Separation of salt-sand mixture. At the beginning of the activity, the boys were notsure what to do. Quin then asked a prediction question ‘How about we pour somewater in here?’. This was of a speculative nature as he did not know what exactlywas going to happen then. After some discussion, the students then poured waterinto the beaker containing the salt-sand mixture and stirred it with a spoon.

Quin: What do you all think the water is going to do? . . . I think the water absorbedthe salt.

Carl: The dirt [sand] didn’t dissolve, so the dirt separated.Quin: But the water would dissolve the salt. I wish we had something to drain this

thing . . .Carl: The salt dissolved. It’s in there.Rick: How do you know it’s in there? Take a test, Carl.Carl: I’m not taking a test.

(Students decanted the salt solution from the wet sand into an aluminium foil pan.)

Quin: A lot of sand, but where did the salt go?Carl: It’s in the water. Gone.

In the above excerpt, when Quin asked the comprehension question ‘What do youall think the water is going to do?’, he was still unsure of the purpose of addingwater. What followed was interesting because he answered his own question byoffering the explanation ‘I think water absorbed the salt’, and Carl elaborated onthis by saying, ‘The dirt [sand] didn’t dissolve, so the dirt separated . . . The saltdissolved. It’s in there’. As the dissolved salt was no more perceptible, Rick askedCarl an anomaly detection question ‘How do you know it’s in there?’. He wantedCarl to provide evidence for this and said, ‘Take a test’.

After draining the salt solution from the wet sand, Quin noticed that there wasno more salt mixed with the sand. This prompted him to ask another comprehen-sion question ‘A lot of sand, but where did the salt go?’ as he tried to figure outwhat had happened to the salt. Quin wondered how he could recover the salt fromthe salt solution and further posed a planning or strategy question ‘How are wegoing to bring it back?’. The boys were stuck for a while. What followed wasinteresting because Quin’s question stimulated Rick to think of the possibility ofheating the salt solution. Here is an example where a student’s (Rick’s) deepthinking processes were triggered off by a peer’s question, and shows the effectof social interaction on stimulating the student’s use of strategies which hadhitherto, been perhaps latent.

It was only after Rick had confirmed his ideas with the teacher about thepossibility of heating the salt solution that the boys managed to recover the saltby heating the salt solution over the alcohol burner. Some of the essential conceptsinvolved in this separation of the salt-sand mixture were highlighted by thestudents when Rick asked Quin what he was thinking of when the salt solutionwas being heated. When Quin answered that he was trying to ‘melt’ the water, Carlcorrected him by suggesting that ‘evaporate’ was a more appropriate word as thewater was ‘boiling’. And Rick demonstrated uptake of this information by addingthat ‘the salt will stay there’. There was co-construction of knowledge during thegroup interaction when the boys refined each other’s ideas and contributed to theevolution of this knowledge.

The above example shows the potentially powerful effect of wondermentquestions in stimulating further thinking in the questioner himself (viz. Quin)

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and those who were engaged in conversation with him (viz. Rick). These ques-tions, which arose because of the students’ speculation or puzzlement, served todirect further inquiry and elicit explanations of what was going on. Because thesequestions piqued the students’ interest, they were followed up on, generatingfurther discussion at a conceptual level.

The girls took a more circuitous route in arriving at their solution. They triedto use a magnet, a sifter, and to create static electricity, all without success. ThenBess asked a series of questions which stimulated Mary to think of ideas that ledher to a ‘breakthrough’, a moment of insight, where she finally solved the problemby adding water to the salt-sand mixture, decanting the salt solution from the wetsand and then heating the salt water with an alcohol burner to evaporate the waterand recover the salt. The following excerpt comes from a segment of the discourseduring the laboratory activity.

Bess: Sand [ . . . ] sand is on a beach, right?Mary: Beaches are warm.Bess: And you know what else? Salt water comes onto beaches. How does the salt

stay there?Mary: OK, we are going to go back to the fire theory!

During the post-instructional interview, Mary explained what she was thinking ofat that moment.

I was trying to think about the ocean and stuff . . . And I was thinking about when Iwent to my grandma’s house one summer [ . . . ] she has a beach-house on MyrtleBeach which is in South Carolina. And where she lives, there’s kind of like a cliff thingon the left of the house. And there’s always like a thin film of salt that’s on the rocks.And I was trying to think of how that salt had gotten there, extracted from the water.And [ . . . ] uh, finally it dawned on me, I was like whoa! [ . . . ] you know, the ocean’smoving you know. It’s warm, the sun’s on it. You know, maybe that’s how it gotthere. And then it just clicked at me. I was like wow! That’s how you do it. So Ipoured the [salt] water in the thing [aluminium pan] and I heated it up . . . That’s whyI thought of heating it. I was linking it to my grandma’s house.

This is an excellent example of Dewey’s (1938) concept of extracting the fullmeaning of each present experience. Mary had made a connection between thesand, salt, water, and heating in the current activity and the beach sand, salt on therocks, ocean waters and hot sun when she was at her grandmother’s beach-house.And all this thinking was stimulated by Bess’ comprehension question ‘How doessalt stay there?’ when she was referring to the salt on beaches and trying to deci-pher how that came about. This is another example where one student’s wonder-ment question stimulated another to figure out a solution to a problem. It showsthe interaction of situational and social factors in bringing deep thinking strategiesto surface in a student. In this case (as in the previous example with the boys’group), it was the average student (Bess cf. Quin) who asked the wondermentquestion, but the academically more able student (Mary cf. Rick) who followedup on the question and came up with a solution to the problem.

Boiling point lab. Unlike the activity on separating the salt-sand mixture whichwas problem-solving in nature, the boiling point activity was relatively proceduraland did not pose much of a cognitive challenge for the students. It did not engen-der much conceptual talk, most of the statements made by the students wereprocedural and observational, and few wonderment questions were asked.

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Because the students were so engrossed in getting the tasks done in the timerequired, they did not ask many questions although some observations puzzledthem. Even when a question was asked, there was little follow-up discussion as thestudents busied themselves with carrying out the prescribed procedures.

Data about students’ questions for the boiling point activity were also availablefrom students’ learning journals, the post-instructional interviews, and a classwriting session where students wrote questions. The findings from these addi-tional data sources showed that the students did indeed have more questionsbeyond those verbalized during the activity. Having to think about what hadpuzzled them and having to ask questions about the activity made the studentsmore aware of what they did not understand or had not thought of earlier. Onestriking finding was that most of the students had the question ‘Why does the saltwater boil faster?’. The students referred to the salt as making the water boil‘faster’ instead of at a higher temperature. This was evident not only during theinterviews with the target students but also during the class writing session whereall the students in the class other than the six target participants wrote questions.The students did not distinguish between the water boiling faster (which refers tothe speed of boiling as determined by the slope of the temperature graph) andwater boiling at a higher temperature (as determined by the maximum temperatureon the upper plateau of the graph). Thus, they regarded water boiling ‘faster’ andwater boiling ‘at a higher temperature’ as synonymous.

Dale wanted to know ‘Why [does] salt water get hotter?’. Bess wrote that ‘Ididn’t know that water could boil when it was less than 100oC’ and wanted to know‘Why did the water boil below the boiling point?’. She was referring to the for-mation of bubbles at temperatures below 100oC as she had thought that the bub-bles would only appear when the temperature reached 100oC. Quin was puzzledabout why the temperature stayed constant at the boiling point.

The case of Carl was particularly enlightening. Although he did not ask anywonderment questions during the activity itself, he had some interesting ideaswhen he wrote the questions in class and in his learning journal. He wrote ‘I learntthe temperature is more extreme when you add salt’ and ‘It was amazing whenwater boiled below the boiling point’. His latter idea probably referred to theformation of bubbles below 100oC. He also wrote ‘I would like to experimentnot only with salt but with sugar’ and wondered ‘if it would be different tempera-tures if we used an alcohol burner instead of a hot-plate’. When asked what madehim think of the latter question, he replied:

Alcohol gives off a different kind of heat . . . It’s fire instead of just a hot-plate. So Ijust thought maybe an alcohol burner gets hotter than a hot-plate. Or maybe it doesn’tget as hot as a hot-plate.

Although the students had noticed that the boiling point of water remained con-stant at 100oC, none of them had noted that the temperature stayed the same for awhile at 0oC when ice melted. Furthermore, because there was no whole-classdiscussion by the teacher after this laboratory activity, some concepts pertainingto the various related phenomena and the questions raised by the students were notaddressed. The above findings suggest that students do not always ask wonder-ment questions spontaneously. Unless they are encouraged to ask them by delib-erately incorporating question-asking in the lesson plan rather than leaving themto chance, many of the students’ questions and puzzlement may go undetected and

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not be dealt with. Wonderment questions, unlike basic information questions,have great potential in stimulating conceptual talk at a higher cognitive levelwhich help students address the major concepts involved in the activities. Thesequestions could help direct further inquiry and trigger deeper thinking in studentsas they discuss their ideas and generate explanations for their observations.

Chromatography activity. For this activity, the teacher introduced the idea of theretention factor, Rf , only as a formula , Rf = DC/DS, the distance the colour moved(DC) divided by the distance the solvent moved (DS). The students carried out thisactivity in a procedural manner according to given instructions, and did not seemto think about what chromatography could be used for or what was the purposeand significance of calculating the Rf for each colour spot. After the boys hadspotted the different ink colours on the filter paper strips, they left the strips tostand for sometime. CC noticed that up till then, they had merely been engaged inconversation of a procedural nature such as which coloured markers to use andhow to arrange the filter paper strips on the supporting straws. They had notdiscussed anything about the separation of colours in the developing chromato-grams. So she decided to find out how they would interpret this observation.

CC: I notice the colours are spreading. There are different shades now. It startedoff with just one colour, right?

Carl: Uh-huh.Quin: Where’s the dot [initial ink spot]?Carl: The dots are gone!. . .CC: What do you think is happening? Why do the dots go away?Quin: Because the water make [ . . . ]Rick: They travel in the water.Carl: Yeah.Quin: Water is travelling up the paper. It made the colour spread.CC: Mrs. Jones was talking about the molecules. How do you think that actually

happens?Quin: The water attract the molecules.Rick: They connect and then they move up with each other.Quin: Move up. Gets to the top so it would attract all the others.

When CC remarked to the boys that the colours were spreading and that there wasjust one colour at the beginning, Quin suddenly noticed that the original ink spothad disappeared. This prompted him to ask ‘Where’s the dot?’ as he tried tofathom what had happened to it. At the same time, Carl expressed surprisewhen he exclaimed ‘the dots are gone!’. This was something unexpected for himas he wrote in his learning journal later, ‘I didn’t think that the original dot on theline would be gone’. He had thought that there would still be a mark where theoriginal spot of colour was. When CC asked the boys ‘Why do the dots go away?’,they attempted to explain what was happening to the colours. Throughout thewhole activity there was only one wonderment question ‘Where’s the dot?’ thatwas asked in the boys’ group. What was it that stimulated Quin to ask ‘Where’s thedot?’ and Carl to notice that the ‘dots’ had disappeared? Perhaps it was due to CC’sprompting and pointing out to the boys that although there was originally only onecolour, the chromatogram was beginning to show different colours. If this wereindeed the case, then this episode suggests the importance and facilitative effectsthat scaffolding has on students asking questions.

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After completing the activity, the students were given further opportunitiesduring the post-instructional interview to ask questions about things they wantedto know. They were also requested to write questions in their learning journal butonly Rick and Carl wrote them. Rick wrote ‘We found out what different colourshad to be mixed to form one’. He wanted to know ‘Why do they [ink spots]separate like that?’ and ‘What do these ‰Rf ] numbers mean?’. Quin did not haveany further questions.

Carl had three interesting wonderment questions. First, he wanted to know‘Why do some pen [ink] run faster than others?’. This question indicated that hewas wondering why the component ink colours had travelled different distancesalong the filter paper strip. Second, he wanted to know ‘Why did some changecolours and others didn’t?’. When asked what he meant by this, he replied:

Well, some of them just took their regular colour and it went up. So there’s a blue dotbelow, and a blue dot up here. Some of them, it’s like here’s red [original ink spot],and here’s red and yellow [component ink spots]. Why do some have their own colourand why do some break into other colours?

Carl was puzzled by why some of the component ink colours were of a similarcolour to the original ink spot whereas others were different from the original one.The third question he asked was ‘If you put more than one colour, would itseparate into just more [colours]?’. He elaborated on this by saying:

Say you have blue and it changes into pink and green. And then you have purple, andit changes into blue and yellow. If you take this colour, you put it right there, and youput this colour and you put it on top of it. Would you have those four colours thatcome out of it?

This last prediction question was like a thought experiment involving conjecturewhere Carl extended his ideas to a hypothetical situation in which he wonderedwhat would happen if two ink colours were mixed together in the original spot.What was interesting about Carl was that in this chromatography activity, as withthe boiling point activity, he asked some thoughtful wonderment questions whenhe was specifically requested to ask questions after doing the activity. Among thegirls, Dale had no further questions, and Bess wanted to know what the Rf valuesmeant. Mary asked two questions: ‘What is the Rf used for?’ (an applicationquestion) and ‘Why does the manufacturing company that make pens add thosecertain colours to make the shade that they want? Why wouldn’t they use othercolours?’.

The findings about students’ questioning in the chromatography activityfurther reinforce the point we made earlier in the boiling point activity that won-derment questions may not always be asked spontaneously by students, especiallyif the students are too preoccupied with following given procedures and not think-ing deeply about what is going on during the activity. For the three activitiesdescribed above, most of the wonderment questions asked during the course ofthe activity came from Quin, Rick and Bess. The two students, Carl and Dale, whoused a predominantly surface approach to learning asked hardly any wondermentquestions while performing the activities. This is not surprising. However, whatwas unexpected was that when the students were specifically instructed to askquestions, Carl was able to come up with some meaningful wonderment questions.This suggests that even students who do not typically ask higher-level

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wonderment questions spontaneously are capable of doing so if given the time andencouragement.

Discussion, implications and conclusions

This study attempted to identify the types of questions that students asked duringscience learning, explicate how question-asking facilitated knowledge construc-tion, and investigate the relationship between students’ questions and approachesto learning. Besides addressing these research questions, other emergent issuesthat arose will also be discussed.

Question types, role in knowledge construction, and relationship tolearning approaches

There were two main categories of student-generated questions: basic informationand wonderment questions. Basic information questions comprised factual andprocedural questions. Wonderment questions which were pitched at a concep-tually higher level included comprehension, prediction, anomaly detection, appli-cation, and planning or strategy questions. There were relatively few wondermentquestions (14%) compared to the total number of questions asked. Proceduralquestions of a low-level nature constituted 65% of all students’ questions. A note-worthy finding was that the activity on the separation of a salt-sand mixture, whichwas the only one that was open-ended and problem-solving in nature, elicited acomparatively high percentage (30%) of wonderment questions. In contrast, wherestep-by-step instructions were given, the students were engrossed in followingprocedures and this resulted in far more procedural questions being asked.

How does question-asking facilitate knowledge construction? Wondermentquestions can shape, focus, and guide thinking, and promote conceptual talkthat pertain to the core concepts of an activity. This may be because such questionsstimulate students to generate explanations and propose solutions to problems. Ananalysis of the students’ discourse and the responses elicited by their wondermentquestions found that these questions stimulated the students themselves or theirgroup members to think more deeply and to hypothesize, predict, figure out whatto do next when they were stuck, and to seek and generate explanations for thingswhich puzzled them. That is, these questions triggered the use of deep thinkingstrategies which may not be invoked if these questions had not been asked. Thus,the questions played an important role in engaging the students’ minds moreactively, engendering productive discussion, and leading to meaningful construc-tion of knowledge.

In our ‘depth dynamic’ model (Chin and Brown 2000b), we postulated howasking wonderment questions, for example, can help learners to initiate a processof hypothesizing, predicting, thought experimenting, and explaining, therebyleading to a cascade of generative activity. This would help them to acquire miss-ing pieces of knowledge or resolve conflicts in their understanding. The modelwas originally proposed to show how various learning strategies, including self-generated questions, intermeshed during deep learning. It focused on the indi-vidual learner and the intra-personal construction of meaning, and explained howthe act of asking questions stimulates oneself to search for answers to one’s ownquestions. However, the findings from this study show that when students

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engaged socially in talk and activity about shared problems or tasks, an individual’squestions could also stimulate another group member to use these strategies andthinking processes, and scientific knowledge and understandings were also con-structed as a group. This is consistent with views of learning as involving not onlythe individual but also the social construction of knowledge (e.g., Driver et al.1994) and that meaning-making and knowledge construction is a dialogic anddialectic process.

As the students collaborate with their peers, they enter the ‘zone of proximaldevelopment’ (Vygotsky 1978) using questions as one of the psychological tools forthinking. Questions help the scaffolding of ideas, encouraging learners or theirpeers to reflect on their own ideas. They facilitate the negotiation of meaning inthe ‘construction zone’ (Newman et al. 1989: ix) which the authors defined as:

a magic place where minds meet, where things are not the same to all who see them,where meanings are fluid, and where one person’s construal may preempt another’s.

The questions embedded in the discourse of collaborative peer groups help lear-ners co-construct knowledge inter-psychologically. This knowledge is then appro-priated or constructed intra-psychologically by the individual members. From asocial-cognitive perspective, questioning in a group context can reveal individuals’misconceptions and deficiencies in their understanding. Input from peers can helpto correct misconceptions and fill in gaps in understanding. Furthermore, askingquestions encourages students to reconsider their ideas in new ways because theyare exposed to different peer perspectives. An example from this study would bewhen Quin reconsidered his ideas of melting and evaporating in the activity onseparating the salt-sand mixture. Question-generation is a constructive activityand is an essential component of student discourse in ‘talking science’ (Hawkinsand Pea 1987, Lemke 1990).

The types of questions that students ask can reveal their depth of thinking.Wonderment questions are associated with a deep approach to learning sciencewhereas basic information questions are related to a more surface approach.However, asking wonderment questions is indicative of only one dimension of adeep learning approach. The other four dimensions associated with a deep learningapproach (viz. generative thinking, nature of explanations, metacognitive activity,and approach to tasks) were discussed in our earlier study (Chin and Brown2000a). The findings in the present study showed that the two students whotypically exhibited a surface learning approach (viz. Carl and Dale) asked relativelyfew wonderment questions during the hands-on activities compared to the others.However, what was somewhat surprising was that Mary, who typically used sev-eral other deep learning strategies such as generating analogies, hypothesizing,predicting, drawing on personal experiences in daily life and applying this knowl-edge to new situations, did not ask many wonderment questions either during theactivities. This finding seems consistent with our earlier suggestion (Chin andBrown 2000a) that students can exhibit depth of thinking in different ways, andthat there may be multiple dimensions associated with a deep learning approachrather than a simple bipolar deep-surface distinction.

One limitation of this study is that the findings were based on only six studentsfrom the same class taught by one teacher. Also, time and manpower limitationsprecluded the collection of additional data from other groups or classes to furtherconfirm the categories of questions generated. The findings are thus presented as

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grounded hypotheses rather than generalizable findings. Purposive sampling wasused to select the target students who represented learners over a range of aca-demic abilities and learning approaches. The case study approach was used tounderstand the particular in depth. As Erickson (1986) pointed out, in attendingto the particular, concrete universals will be discovered and

the search is not for abstract universals arrived at by statistical generalizations from asample to a population, but for concrete universals arrived at by studying a specificcase in great detail and then comparing it with other cases studied in equally greatdetail. (p. 130)

The general can be found in the particular. And what one learns from a particularsituation may be transferable to the situations subsequently encountered (Merriam1988: 176) as in other science classroom contexts. Another limitation is that someof the students’ questions may not have been verbalized or thought-aloud duringthe hands-on activities, and thus were not captured on tape as verbal data forsubsequent analysis. Question-asking can be a covert mental activity and thinkingaloud is not natural for many individuals. Although attempts were made to maxi-mize the collection of data on students’ questions (through stimulated recall duringpost-instructional interviews and written questions), not all the six students wrotequestions for every activity, and it was not possible to document each and everyquestion that the students had.

We have studied the role of student questioning in classroom discourse whilethe students were engaged in hands-on laboratory activities during regular scienceclasses and situated in the authentic context of a naturalistic setting (Brown et al.1989, Hennessey 1993). This differs from most previous research on students’questions where the focus was on questions written after an activity, or on ques-tions asked in response to reading a given text as part of an ad hoc task, or aftertraining students to ask certain kinds of questions. Thus, our concern withstudents’ questions that arose naturally in discourse in authentic settings lendssome measure of ecological validity to the findings, and provides informationbeyond that of previous research. We tried to relate the kinds of questions thatstudents asked to their learning approaches, as well as the kinds of responses thatthe questions elicited. We also developed a taxonomy of question types whichclassifies students’ questions according to different conceptual levels. Such a clas-sification could be useful in helping teachers to plan their activities so as to fosterstudent questioning at a higher cognitive level. Gall (1970), a significant figure inthe field of questioning in education, reviewed the research on questioning inteaching and concluded that it would be of interest to investigate the types ofquestions students ask, but that the more important task was to identify thetypes of questions which students should be encouraged to ask. This study hashelped to identify some of these questions that help to bring about more mean-ingful learning, thereby leading to knowledge construction.

Emergent issues and implications of students’ questions for scienceteaching

There are five important issues regarding questioning by students. First, askingwonderment questions is manifestation of the use of deep processing strategies andreflective of a deep approach to learning. As mentioned earlier, this represents only

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one dimension of a deep learning approach. Because students may be more proneto deep thinking in some dimensions than in others, teachers, by being aware of themultidimensionality of learning approaches, can help students deepen their think-ing starting from the dimension where they already show some depth. For ex-ample, if students show depth in being able to generate wonderment questions, theteacher can capitalize on this dimension and encourage them to ‘enter the depthdynamic’ (Chin and Brown 2000b) so as to increase their depth of thinking in otherrelated areas. As pointed out in our depth dynamic model, learners can enter thisdynamic from multiple points and question-asking is but one point of entry.

Second, students asked mainly procedural questions when the assigned tasksrequired them to follow given instructions and step-by-step procedures, and thisdid not engage them at high cognitive levels. During such activities, most of theverbal interaction consisted of procedural and observational rather than analytical,conceptual or metaconceptual statements. The students focused on discussing theexperimental set-ups, how to perform the experiment according to the proceduresgiven by their teacher, and how to achieve the correct results. There was littleexploration and inquiry based on their own ideas. Since the students were notexplicitly required to make predictions, give explanations, or ask questions, itwas more natural for them to focus on the procedural and observational aspectsof the activity instead. As pointed out by She (1999), learning in such a contextencourages students to spend a lot of time discussing such issues to make sure theydid things right, according to the teacher’s expectations. In contrast, an open-ended, problem-solving activity such as the separation of a salt-sand mixturewhich was carried out in the spirit of a scientific inquiry, elicited more and a richerrange of wonderment questions and talk at higher conceptual levels. This impliesthat the nature of tasks that teachers set and the cognitive demands required of thestudents influence the types of questions that students ask, and thus to someextent, the learning approach and learning strategies that they adopt. Thus, toencourage deep thinking in their students, teachers should present their laboratoryactivities in a manner that encourages inquiry and problem-solving rather thanfollowing instructions to obtain an expected answer.

Third, asking wonderment questions can stimulate either the questionersthemselves or another student to generate an answer, thereby bringing to thefore, other deep learning strategies which have hitherto been latent, and potentiallyleading to talk at a higher conceptual level. For example, in the activity on separ-ating the salt-sand mixture, Quin asked a number of wonderment questions whichstimulated both himself and the other two boys to generate a solution to the prob-lem as well as to construct explanations for the observed phenomena. One impli-cation arising from this pertains to the assignment of students in groups. Forexample, if a teacher is aware that a particular student shows some depth in askingwonderment questions, would grouping this student with other members whoquestion less, help to steer the other group members in their thinking and co-construction of knowledge? Or might this student dominate the group and hinderthe others from asking questions instead? It is also possible that grouping studentswho show depth in different dimensions would lead to an optimum learning envir-onment where each student is able to enter the construction zone and help eachother enter the depth dynamic more productively.

Fourth, the students did not always ask wonderment questions spontaneously.Such questions, if addressed, can help students clarify their doubts and advance

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their conceptual understanding. However, the students might not have asked thesequestions spontaneously during laboratory activities simply because they were notaware of what was significant to look out for, and thus let some important observa-tions slip by without noticing or paying attention to them. Furthermore, becausethe students were so engrossed with getting the assigned tasks done, they glossedover the details in their observations that were essential to the core concepts of theactivity. The boiling point activity is an example. However, the students askedmore meaningful questions upon subsequent probing and nudging during thepost-instructional interviews and when they were requested to write questionsduring the class writing session and in their learning journals. This suggests thatunless students are stimulated to think about such questions, many students wouldnot ask them. However, if students are specifically encouraged to ask them, manysuch questions can be generated.

Students do not necessarily say if they have problems or doubts. In fact, theymay not even be aware of what they do not know or understand, and simply lettheir puzzlement slip by without addressing it. Students’ attempts to constructmeaning are also not always apparent to the teacher. Thus, many of their questionsand puzzlement may go undetected and not be dealt with as the teacher may not beaware of them. Consequently, a lot of potential conceptual talk could be untappedif these questions are not asked. For example, in the boiling point activity in thisstudy, the students went through the motions of carrying out the activity but theteacher was unaware of much of the students’ puzzlement. The detailed analysis ofthe taped discourse helped to uncover much of what transpired among the studentsin the group activities. This state of affairs could have been invisible to the teacher.This implies that teachers cannot fully rely on students’ spontaneous questioningand must explicitly orient their students towards asking questions, for example, byspecifically encouraging them to generate questions, either verbally or written, aspart of their class activities. Besides prompting students to think more deeplyabout what they are doing and encouraging critical thinking, such questionscould also provide feedback to teachers about their students’ thinking and puzzle-ment, and act as a window to the students’ minds.

Fifth, even the students who typically did not spontaneously ask higher-levelwonderment questions were capable of asking thoughtful questions when time wasspecifically set aside for them to ask questions about things that puzzled them orwhich they would like to know more about. This suggests that teachers couldexplicitly encourage such students to ask questions by providing extra opportu-nities for them to do so. In sum, this study has provided evidence for the complex-ity of student questioning that is characterized by the interactions of context,content, and response and reactions to questions (the three dimensions accordingto Carlsen’s (1991) sociolinguistic framework). The nature and content of thequestions was mediated by the contingencies of discourse context and responseand reaction patterns.

Future research

The results of this study indicate that student-generated questions are a mean-ingful aspect of learning in science. As in the study by Costa et al. (2000) onstudents’ question-asking on scientific texts, our findings also show that studentsare able to ask ‘good’ questions when given the opportunity to do so, beyond

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normal classroom conditions. There is much scope for future research on howinnovative pedagogies can be best implemented in the classroom to realizeShodell’s (1995) vision of the ‘question-driven classroom’ where each student isplaced in an active role as questioner, to promote inquiry in science instruction.One area that seems fruitful for research is how teachers can encourage a ‘ques-tion-based learning’ approach (Watts, Gould et al. 1997) in their classrooms. Forexample, how can teachers foster a classroom discourse that stimulates question-asking? How can teachers structure the physical and learning environment toencourage questioning? What specific, practical, strategies can teachers use topromote student questioning? The focus of such a study could be on devisinginstructional strategies that attempt to induce deep thinking through student-gen-erated wonderment questions and then studying the effects of such questions onsubsequent discourse and knowledge construction. For example, one might studyhow the teacher can scaffold student discourse and provide a task structure tofoster question-asking that would lead to productive inquiry and higher levelcognitive and metacognitive talk. The teacher could ask students to write theirquestions before performing an activity to help them direct their own inquiry anduse these questions as a springboard for investigation and discussion. The studentscould also think about particular questions as they work on their tasks. Then, atthe end of the activity, the students can write questions reflecting what theywondered about, what had puzzled them, or what they needed to know to under-stand more about the topic in question. Through this process of question-askingand explaining, the students verbalize their ideas, reflect on the thinking they haveengaged in, and externalize mental activities that are usually covert.

It is not enough merely to provide opportunities for students to ask questions.Teachers need to take a proactive stance and employ strategies to encouragestudents to ask questions. Biddulph et al. (1986) suggested four ways of doingthis. These include providing students with suitable stimuli, modelling ques-tion-asking, developing a receptive classroom atmosphere, and including ques-tion-asking in evaluation. To provide students with suitable stimulus material,Jelly (1985) proposed that teachers use anomalous happenings and materials thatdo unexpected things as question stimulators, and that students be put in contactwith interesting materials and given the opportunity to ask questions. Symington(1980) has also reported that letting students enjoy a period of unstructured obser-vation with materials increased the number of questions they were able to ask.

White and Gunstone (1992) proposed the use of structuring or focusing stra-tegies such as providing a stimulus (e.g., table of data or diagram) on whichquestions are to be based, providing an answer and asking for questions, andasking students to begin questions in a particular way (e.g. ‘What if . . . ’, ‘Whydoes . . . ’, ‘Why are . . . ’, ‘How would . . . ’) as such questions are more likely to bebased on deeper thinking than simple recall. White (1977) has suggested that theability to formulate questions is a skill which needs to be taught rather than left tochance, and that the teacher could provide examples of how to form questions.Students may also need explicit training in questioning strategies such as learningthe linguistic forms of effective queries and the syntax of question formulation.King (1994) found that giving students thought-provoking question stems helpedthem to generate questions that prompted them to compare and contrast, infercause and effect, note strengths and weaknesses, evaluate ideas, explain, andjustify. Students can also be guided to form investigable questions that are

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amenable to practical investigations. Such questions have been termed ‘produc-tive’ questions (Elstgeest 1985) or ‘operational’ questions (Alfke 1974, Allison andShrigley 1986). Operational questions help students to manipulate variables inscience experiments through eliminating, substituting, and increasing or decreas-ing the presence of a variable.

To foster a ‘question rich environment’ (Watts, Alsop et al. 1997), White(1977) has suggested that ‘praise should be given to those who invent questions,repressions should be avoided’ (p. 125). Several authors (Eisner 1965: 628, Whiteand Gunstone 1992) have also suggested that teachers ask students to write ques-tions about aspects of what they are learning which are puzzling to them. Teacherscan also ask their students to record any questions that they have in a diary orlearning journal, thus documenting a set of ‘I Wonder’ questions (e.g., Kulas1995). The teacher can pause at convenient intervals during the lesson and requestthe students to write down questions they wish to ask, and then use these questionsas ‘thought provokers’ for stimulating discussions (Maskill and Pedrosa de Jesus1997a, b).

How can teachers structure classroom space and time to encourage questions?Dixon (1996) described the use of a ‘question board’ to display students’ questionsrelating to the topic being taught and described how these questions may be usedas starting points for scientific investigations. Watts, Gould et al. (1997) have alsosuggested including specific times for questions such as a period of ‘free questiontime’ within a lesson or block of lessons, a question ‘brainstorm’ at the start of atopic, a ‘question box’ on a side table where students can put their (anonymous)questions, turn-taking questioning around the class where each student or group ofstudents must prepare a question to be asked of others, and ‘question-making’homework. Teachers can also establish a ‘problem corner’ in the classroom andencourage students to supply ‘questions of the week’ (Jelly 1985).

The results of this study indicate that students asked more wonderment ques-tions for problem-solving than for procedural tasks. Also, some students tended toask more wonderment questions than others. Given these findings, issues relatedto teaching for student questioning, such as the contextual influences on question-ing behaviour, could also be investigated. Pertinent research questions that can beaddressed include ‘How do students’ questions vary according to the nature ofassigned tasks?’ and ‘In what ways might students be grouped to ensure an optimallearning environment for productive student questioning and discussion?’. Thestudy by Marbach-Ad and Sokolove (2000) found that students from ‘active learn-ing’, co-operative groups (which focused on question-asking) were able to posebetter and higher level questions than those taught in a traditional lecture format.Accordingly, more in-depth research on the influence of different task types andstudent groupings on student questioning would be useful. Given individual dif-ferences in learning style, a study designed to answer the question ‘In what dif-ferent ways might individual students react when they are specifically encouragedto ask questions during instruction?’ also warrants attention. It is possible thevarious scaffolding strategies may benefit different individuals to differing extents.For example, some students may find it distracting or stressful if they are explicitlyasked to pose questions, and may not welcome such a requirement by the teacher.On the other hand, others like Carl may find such an experience helpful in stimu-lating and nurturing their thinking.

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It is widely agreed among the educational community that to know how toquestion is critical to knowing how to teach well. As Betts (1910) stated, ‘Skill inthe art of questioning lies at the basis of all good teaching’ (p. 55). However, withthe emphasis today on active, independent, and student-centred learning, perhapsa more relevant proposition would be: to know how to question is to know how tolearn well.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the teacher and students who participated in this study,and whose cooperation produced such rich and fascinating data. Our thanks arealso due to the editor and reviewers for their encouraging and helpful comments onan earlier draft of the manuscript.

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