- Email: [email protected]
School: institution where children learn the answers without asking question?
Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2010) 000–000 Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 29 (2011) 1091 – 1095
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
International Conference on Education and Educational Psychology (ICEEPSY 2011)
School: institution where children learn the answers without asking question? Jana Marie Havigerováa1*, Kateřina Juklováb a
Institute of Primary and Preprimary Education, Faculty of Education, University of Hradec Kralove b Department of Pedagogy and Psychology , Faculty of Education, University of Hradec Kralove University of Hradec Kralove, Rokitanskeho 62, Hradec Kralove 50003, Czech Republic
Abstract
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 questions – boys slightly more often than girls – and 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. 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility Dr. Zafer Bekirogullari Cognitive – Counselling, ©©2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review underof responsibility of Dr of Zafer Bekirogullari. Research & Conference Services C-crcs. Keyvords: school education, information behaviour, analysis of verbal behaviour, questions
1. Introduction The contemporary information society (eg. Webster, 2006) imposes new demands on its members – to cope with new technologies, to orientate in the world of information; in other words to achieve information literacy. The information literacy fulfils by means of information behaviour: behaviour developed by the need of getting information (e.g. Wilson, 1981). A significant predictor of successful information behaviour is question skill. Do our school support the development of this skill? Are our children been asked by teachers in the school? Are our pupils
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +420-493-331-341; fax: +420-493-331-311. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1877-0428 © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Dr Zafer Bekirogullari. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.342
1092
Jana Marie and Kateřina Juklová / Procedia - Social andSciences Behavioral Sciences 29 (2011) 1091 – 1095 JanaHavigerová Marie Havigerová / Procedia – Social and Behavioral 00 (2011) 000–000
asking questions themselves during school education? These are undoubtedly important questions for our education and for our future even more. 2. Questioning skill The ability to question is innate to man. The first observable manifestations of this ability are already apparent at the age of eighteen months (a period referred to by linguists as the first age of questions) when the questions "who" and "what" appear. The divide between the toddler and preschool developmental periods (around the 3rd year) is a period that includes the rapid development of the skill of asking questions; all other types of questions appear, including the most significant questions for this age of "why" (e.g. Lechta et al., 1990 ). From the moment a person anchors his experience with asking questions, that is, from the age of around three years, these become a permanent structure of the cognitive apparatus – respectively, they should become a permanent part, if their production is supported, because it is known about skills that if they are not strengthened, they weaken and disappear (e.g. Paas et al., 2003). The ability to ask questions is not an isolated phenomenon but is connected with many mental functions. First, the question is the product of the thinking and experiencing processes. A question naturally arises in the human mind in a situation where the individual does not receive some information – he is thinking about something and the stream of thought stops because a) he does not know something, or b) he is not sure of something. At this moment, a feeling experience comes into play (a feeling of insecurity, curiosity, etc.) and a need for information arises (I want to know, I would like to know, I need to know, I should know, etc.) (e.g. Wilson, 1981). On the other hand, a question acts as a trigger to the cognitive processes. Ramey and Meegan (2009) literally say that "questions generate thinking." The two basic types of questions evoke two different types of thinking: closed questions trigger convergent thinking, while open questions trigger divergent thinking. Ramey and Megan, in the same breath, added: “The problem is that questions generate thinking, while answers stop thinking in its tracks. Only through questions do our minds truly think.” (Ramey and Meegan, ib.). It is therefore very important that the educational process activate thinking and support the ability to ask questions, instead of the traditional transfer of finished knowledge, or passive responses in terms of the pupil. 3. Method 3.1. Objectives To analyze the questions asked in natural school conditions. 3.2. Participants, material and procedure The basic research material is the Czech National Corpus Schola2010 (2010). The Corpus is a set of computerstored texts (in the case of spoken language, transcripts of recorded speech), which serve primarily for linguistic research. Corpus Schola2010 contains transcripts of spoken language lessons from 204 lessons acquired in 115 different classes all over the Czech Republic. Corpus contains 792,764 words. The material for the Corpus Schola2010 was obtained from 47 teachers and 2347 students, the ratio of male:female being approximately 1:1. The age of teachers ranges from 23 to 53 years; half of the teachers are younger than 30 years, so the file contains more younger teachers. The age of pupils ranges from 6 to 21 years, being pupils across the board from grade 1 to past the 4th year of secondary school or its equivalent (e.g. eighth year of gymnasium), excepting the fourth grade of primary school (data from this year could not be obtained). Procedure: frequency analysis of corpus data and statistical analysis.
Jana Marie Havigerová Kateřina Juklová / Procedia Social and Behavioral 29 000–000 (2011) 1091 – 1095 Jana Marieand Havigerová / Procedia – Social-and Behavioral SciencesSciences 00 (2011)
1093
4. Results 4.1. How many questions does the teacher or students ask during a single lesson? We identified a total of 20,489 questions in the corpus. We were interested in who placed the question. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics as per role – i.e. how many questions were asked by the teachers and how many by the pupils during a lesson. Table 1: Number of question asked during one lesson
The number of questions during one lesson N
Statistics Teacher
Class
One pupil
Total
204
204
Mean
80,89
19,36
1,11
100,25
Median
74,50
15,00
1,00
94,00
43,195
16,344
1,45
45,469
St.deviation
204
Table 1 shows that per lesson, teachers give an average of 81 interrogative sentences, pupils 20. Due to the fact that there are 14 students in the classroom on average, then statistically we come to the conclusion that during one lesson only one pupil asks an average of one single question. On the first level, where there are fewer split hours, i.e. more pupils in the class, an average of only 0.33 questions per student was ascertained. I consider this finding alarming. The content analysis of the questions that are actually asked reveals another unflattering fact. An overwhelming majority of questions placed by the teacher are supplementary questions, so-called tag questions (e.g. "This topic was teaching in last lesson, right?!"). The remaining questions from the mouth of the teacher are largely factual, i.e. questions activating the memory (e.g. "When was Charles University founded?"). Open questions promoting independent critical or creative thinking and other cognitive functions were placed by individual monitored teachers either minimally or not at all. 4.2. Who asks more questions – boys or girls? We verified the effect that gender has on student questioning using the paired samples test. The number of querying boys and girls during one lesson was compared. The difference between the activity of boys and girls is statistically significant (t=4.1196, df=203, p<0.001). Descriptive statistics data make this information more exact – an average of 4 boys and 2 to 3 girls raise questions aloud in class (see Table 2). Table 2: The number of questioners during 1 lesson
The number of questioners N Mean Median St.deviation
Statistics Boys Girls
Boys
Girls
204
204
Quartile 25
2,00
1,00
4,07
2,84
Quartile 50
4,00
2,00
4,00
2,00
Quartile 75
5,75
4,00
2,92
2,35
Jana Marie Havigerová / Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 1094
Jana Marie Havigerová and Kateřina Juklová / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 29 (2011) 1091 – 1095
From this we can deduce that boys are a bit bolder than girls in terms of willingness to stand before the class and raise a question aloud. 5. Discussion and conclusions The ability to question is natural to man, just like the ability to use tools or the ability to laugh. Children already use questions spontaneously in the 18th month of their life and if they are supported, they use this skill throughout their life in all possible contexts (and not just at school). The school, where children and adolescents spend a predominant part of their lives, is supposed to foster the development of competencies for life, including space for the development of information and communication skills, including also the monitored ability to ask questions. According to our observations, however, the educational process at Czech primary and secondary schools does not support the ability to ask questions. As I argue in this paper, teachers provide an inappropriate model – 1) teachers ask a limited number of questions, 2) when teachers ask questions, the vast majority of them are low-level questions (mostly supplementary questions and questions activating the memory but not thinking). Other findings, which are the subject of another publication of the authors' work, suggest that 3) teachers do not teach students to ask questions (the teaching virtually includes no activity in which students learn to ask questions and are exercised), 4) teachers do not motivate students to ask questions (students are not encouraged to ask questions and are not rewarded for a good question), and 5) teachers discourage students from asking questions (the content and emotional response to student questions has a predominantly negative character). This phenomenon may be rooted in Czech school tradition and teacher’s implicit theories too (Havigerová, Haviger, 2010). Students at contemporary Czech schools do not have space to ask their own questions. The finding that one student asks only one single question during one lesson on average is alarming. If the students raise questions aloud at all, these are only three to four students in the class on average while the rest is the silent majority in this regard. This finding is very unflattering. Conclusion: The contemporary Czech school is an institution where children learn the answers without asking questions. If the teachers are to promote the development of critical thinking and other cognitive functions in accordance with the requirements for the competence of modern man, as called for by our contemporary information society, it is essential to stimulate a change in the methods and formats of education (see e.g. the authority of the world format by Bloom, 1956 and Vygotsky, 1988). A starter bridge may be the practice of asking relevant questions and supporting the activities of students towards asking questions (see e.g. Zagašev, 2001, Le-May Sheffield, 2002, Hayes 2009). Acknowledgement This work was supported by Czech Science Foundation, project “Ready to ask?” reg. no. GAP407/11/0426 6. References Bloom BS. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Longman. ISBN 978-0679302094 Czech National Corpus - SCHOLA2010. (2010). Ústav Českého národního korpusu FF UK, Praha. Available at: http://www.korpus.cz Havigerová, JM., Haviger, J. (2009): Research methods of implicit theories on normality. Media4u Magazine, 3, 310. ISSN 1214-9187 Hayes D. (2009). Encyclopedia of Primary Education. David Fulton Publishers. ISBN 978-0415485173
Jana Marie Havigerová Kateřina Juklová / Procedia Social and Behavioral 29 000–000 (2011) 1091 – 1095 Jana Marieand Havigerová / Procedia – Social-and Behavioral SciencesSciences 00 (2011)
1095
Le-May Sheffield S. (2002). Question Asking. Paper presented at the CLT TA Teaching Workshop Asking Questions. November 6, 2002. Available at: http://learningandteaching.dal.ca/aqh.html Paas F., Renkl A., Sweller J. (2003). Cognitive Load Theory: A Special Issue of EducationalPpsychologist. Routledge. ISBN 978-0805896107 Ramey L., Meegan G. (2009). The Criticial Thinking Community [online]. Retrieved: June 2011. Available at: http://www.criticalthinking.org/index.cfm Vygotsky LS, Rieber RW, Carton AS. (1988). The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky: Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology, Including the Volume Thinking and Speech: Problems of General ... and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer. ISBN 978-0306424410 Webster F. (2006). Theories of the Information Society. Series: International Library of Sociology. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415406321 Wilson TD. (1981). On user studies and information needs. Journal of Documentation, 37, 3-15 Zagašev I. (2001). Jak se dobře ptát. Kritické myšlení [online]. Retrieved April 2011. Available at: http://www.kritickemysleni.cz/klisty_archiv.php
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2010) 000–000 Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 29 (2011) 1091 – 1095
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
International Conference on Education and Educational Psychology (ICEEPSY 2011)
School: institution where children learn the answers without asking question? Jana Marie Havigerováa1*, Kateřina Juklováb a
Institute of Primary and Preprimary Education, Faculty of Education, University of Hradec Kralove b Department of Pedagogy and Psychology , Faculty of Education, University of Hradec Kralove University of Hradec Kralove, Rokitanskeho 62, Hradec Kralove 50003, Czech Republic
Abstract
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 questions – boys slightly more often than girls – and 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. 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility Dr. Zafer Bekirogullari Cognitive – Counselling, ©©2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review underof responsibility of Dr of Zafer Bekirogullari. Research & Conference Services C-crcs. Keyvords: school education, information behaviour, analysis of verbal behaviour, questions
1. Introduction The contemporary information society (eg. Webster, 2006) imposes new demands on its members – to cope with new technologies, to orientate in the world of information; in other words to achieve information literacy. The information literacy fulfils by means of information behaviour: behaviour developed by the need of getting information (e.g. Wilson, 1981). A significant predictor of successful information behaviour is question skill. Do our school support the development of this skill? Are our children been asked by teachers in the school? Are our pupils
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +420-493-331-341; fax: +420-493-331-311. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1877-0428 © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Dr Zafer Bekirogullari. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.342
1092
Jana Marie and Kateřina Juklová / Procedia - Social andSciences Behavioral Sciences 29 (2011) 1091 – 1095 JanaHavigerová Marie Havigerová / Procedia – Social and Behavioral 00 (2011) 000–000
asking questions themselves during school education? These are undoubtedly important questions for our education and for our future even more. 2. Questioning skill The ability to question is innate to man. The first observable manifestations of this ability are already apparent at the age of eighteen months (a period referred to by linguists as the first age of questions) when the questions "who" and "what" appear. The divide between the toddler and preschool developmental periods (around the 3rd year) is a period that includes the rapid development of the skill of asking questions; all other types of questions appear, including the most significant questions for this age of "why" (e.g. Lechta et al., 1990 ). From the moment a person anchors his experience with asking questions, that is, from the age of around three years, these become a permanent structure of the cognitive apparatus – respectively, they should become a permanent part, if their production is supported, because it is known about skills that if they are not strengthened, they weaken and disappear (e.g. Paas et al., 2003). The ability to ask questions is not an isolated phenomenon but is connected with many mental functions. First, the question is the product of the thinking and experiencing processes. A question naturally arises in the human mind in a situation where the individual does not receive some information – he is thinking about something and the stream of thought stops because a) he does not know something, or b) he is not sure of something. At this moment, a feeling experience comes into play (a feeling of insecurity, curiosity, etc.) and a need for information arises (I want to know, I would like to know, I need to know, I should know, etc.) (e.g. Wilson, 1981). On the other hand, a question acts as a trigger to the cognitive processes. Ramey and Meegan (2009) literally say that "questions generate thinking." The two basic types of questions evoke two different types of thinking: closed questions trigger convergent thinking, while open questions trigger divergent thinking. Ramey and Megan, in the same breath, added: “The problem is that questions generate thinking, while answers stop thinking in its tracks. Only through questions do our minds truly think.” (Ramey and Meegan, ib.). It is therefore very important that the educational process activate thinking and support the ability to ask questions, instead of the traditional transfer of finished knowledge, or passive responses in terms of the pupil. 3. Method 3.1. Objectives To analyze the questions asked in natural school conditions. 3.2. Participants, material and procedure The basic research material is the Czech National Corpus Schola2010 (2010). The Corpus is a set of computerstored texts (in the case of spoken language, transcripts of recorded speech), which serve primarily for linguistic research. Corpus Schola2010 contains transcripts of spoken language lessons from 204 lessons acquired in 115 different classes all over the Czech Republic. Corpus contains 792,764 words. The material for the Corpus Schola2010 was obtained from 47 teachers and 2347 students, the ratio of male:female being approximately 1:1. The age of teachers ranges from 23 to 53 years; half of the teachers are younger than 30 years, so the file contains more younger teachers. The age of pupils ranges from 6 to 21 years, being pupils across the board from grade 1 to past the 4th year of secondary school or its equivalent (e.g. eighth year of gymnasium), excepting the fourth grade of primary school (data from this year could not be obtained). Procedure: frequency analysis of corpus data and statistical analysis.
Jana Marie Havigerová Kateřina Juklová / Procedia Social and Behavioral 29 000–000 (2011) 1091 – 1095 Jana Marieand Havigerová / Procedia – Social-and Behavioral SciencesSciences 00 (2011)
1093
4. Results 4.1. How many questions does the teacher or students ask during a single lesson? We identified a total of 20,489 questions in the corpus. We were interested in who placed the question. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics as per role – i.e. how many questions were asked by the teachers and how many by the pupils during a lesson. Table 1: Number of question asked during one lesson
The number of questions during one lesson N
Statistics Teacher
Class
One pupil
Total
204
204
Mean
80,89
19,36
1,11
100,25
Median
74,50
15,00
1,00
94,00
43,195
16,344
1,45
45,469
St.deviation
204
Table 1 shows that per lesson, teachers give an average of 81 interrogative sentences, pupils 20. Due to the fact that there are 14 students in the classroom on average, then statistically we come to the conclusion that during one lesson only one pupil asks an average of one single question. On the first level, where there are fewer split hours, i.e. more pupils in the class, an average of only 0.33 questions per student was ascertained. I consider this finding alarming. The content analysis of the questions that are actually asked reveals another unflattering fact. An overwhelming majority of questions placed by the teacher are supplementary questions, so-called tag questions (e.g. "This topic was teaching in last lesson, right?!"). The remaining questions from the mouth of the teacher are largely factual, i.e. questions activating the memory (e.g. "When was Charles University founded?"). Open questions promoting independent critical or creative thinking and other cognitive functions were placed by individual monitored teachers either minimally or not at all. 4.2. Who asks more questions – boys or girls? We verified the effect that gender has on student questioning using the paired samples test. The number of querying boys and girls during one lesson was compared. The difference between the activity of boys and girls is statistically significant (t=4.1196, df=203, p<0.001). Descriptive statistics data make this information more exact – an average of 4 boys and 2 to 3 girls raise questions aloud in class (see Table 2). Table 2: The number of questioners during 1 lesson
The number of questioners N Mean Median St.deviation
Statistics Boys Girls
Boys
Girls
204
204
Quartile 25
2,00
1,00
4,07
2,84
Quartile 50
4,00
2,00
4,00
2,00
Quartile 75
5,75
4,00
2,92
2,35
Jana Marie Havigerová / Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 1094
Jana Marie Havigerová and Kateřina Juklová / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 29 (2011) 1091 – 1095
From this we can deduce that boys are a bit bolder than girls in terms of willingness to stand before the class and raise a question aloud. 5. Discussion and conclusions The ability to question is natural to man, just like the ability to use tools or the ability to laugh. Children already use questions spontaneously in the 18th month of their life and if they are supported, they use this skill throughout their life in all possible contexts (and not just at school). The school, where children and adolescents spend a predominant part of their lives, is supposed to foster the development of competencies for life, including space for the development of information and communication skills, including also the monitored ability to ask questions. According to our observations, however, the educational process at Czech primary and secondary schools does not support the ability to ask questions. As I argue in this paper, teachers provide an inappropriate model – 1) teachers ask a limited number of questions, 2) when teachers ask questions, the vast majority of them are low-level questions (mostly supplementary questions and questions activating the memory but not thinking). Other findings, which are the subject of another publication of the authors' work, suggest that 3) teachers do not teach students to ask questions (the teaching virtually includes no activity in which students learn to ask questions and are exercised), 4) teachers do not motivate students to ask questions (students are not encouraged to ask questions and are not rewarded for a good question), and 5) teachers discourage students from asking questions (the content and emotional response to student questions has a predominantly negative character). This phenomenon may be rooted in Czech school tradition and teacher’s implicit theories too (Havigerová, Haviger, 2010). Students at contemporary Czech schools do not have space to ask their own questions. The finding that one student asks only one single question during one lesson on average is alarming. If the students raise questions aloud at all, these are only three to four students in the class on average while the rest is the silent majority in this regard. This finding is very unflattering. Conclusion: The contemporary Czech school is an institution where children learn the answers without asking questions. If the teachers are to promote the development of critical thinking and other cognitive functions in accordance with the requirements for the competence of modern man, as called for by our contemporary information society, it is essential to stimulate a change in the methods and formats of education (see e.g. the authority of the world format by Bloom, 1956 and Vygotsky, 1988). A starter bridge may be the practice of asking relevant questions and supporting the activities of students towards asking questions (see e.g. Zagašev, 2001, Le-May Sheffield, 2002, Hayes 2009). Acknowledgement This work was supported by Czech Science Foundation, project “Ready to ask?” reg. no. GAP407/11/0426 6. References Bloom BS. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Longman. ISBN 978-0679302094 Czech National Corpus - SCHOLA2010. (2010). Ústav Českého národního korpusu FF UK, Praha. Available at: http://www.korpus.cz Havigerová, JM., Haviger, J. (2009): Research methods of implicit theories on normality. Media4u Magazine, 3, 310. ISSN 1214-9187 Hayes D. (2009). Encyclopedia of Primary Education. David Fulton Publishers. ISBN 978-0415485173
Jana Marie Havigerová Kateřina Juklová / Procedia Social and Behavioral 29 000–000 (2011) 1091 – 1095 Jana Marieand Havigerová / Procedia – Social-and Behavioral SciencesSciences 00 (2011)
1095
Le-May Sheffield S. (2002). Question Asking. Paper presented at the CLT TA Teaching Workshop Asking Questions. November 6, 2002. Available at: http://learningandteaching.dal.ca/aqh.html Paas F., Renkl A., Sweller J. (2003). Cognitive Load Theory: A Special Issue of EducationalPpsychologist. Routledge. ISBN 978-0805896107 Ramey L., Meegan G. (2009). The Criticial Thinking Community [online]. Retrieved: June 2011. Available at: http://www.criticalthinking.org/index.cfm Vygotsky LS, Rieber RW, Carton AS. (1988). The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky: Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology, Including the Volume Thinking and Speech: Problems of General ... and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer. ISBN 978-0306424410 Webster F. (2006). Theories of the Information Society. Series: International Library of Sociology. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415406321 Wilson TD. (1981). On user studies and information needs. Journal of Documentation, 37, 3-15 Zagašev I. (2001). Jak se dobře ptát. Kritické myšlení [online]. Retrieved April 2011. Available at: http://www.kritickemysleni.cz/klisty_archiv.php