Chpater+8+Questioning

Questioning: The Strategy that Propels Readers Forward
Pages 109-129 photo: Horia Varlan

In Chapter 8, Harvey and Goudvis show us how to teach children to question their reading processes and to question the texts they read in different ways. They say, "Our students need to know that their questions matter. They need to see us asking questions as well as answering them" (p. 109). The resources provided here will extend your understanding of the research on questioning as a comprehension strategy and give you access to video resources that show you how teachers empower their students to ask questions as they read.

Much like other strategies that Harvey and Goudvis recommend (e.g., summarizing, monitoring) it's difficult to talk about questioning without considering how it interacts with and reinforces other strategies. For instance, asking questions about a character's motivations could also be considered inferencing; asking, "Did I understand what I just read" is also monitoring. The research community has often taken an integrated view to questioning as one strategy that works in combination with others to support comprehension. For this reason, a couple of the articles recommended below are not specifically focused on questioning, per se, but rather include questioning as part of a suite of skills that support comprehension.


 * Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., Sandora, C. & Kucan, L. (1996). Questioning the author: A yearlong classroom implementation to engage students with text. //Elementary School Journal, 96//, 385-414. doi:10.1086/461835 Retrieved from []
 * This article provides a detailed account of one reading comprehension intervention study that is grounded in questioning as its core approach. In this article, Beck and colleagues present //Questioning the Author (QtA)//, a method that they describe as "a deceptively simple approach with a minimum of apparatus" (p. 387). In QtA, students "grapple with and reflect on what an author is trying to say in order to build a representation from it" (p. 387). The type of questioning encouraged in QtA is designed to invite "understanding, interpretation and elaboration" (p. 387) rather than a focus on a singular view of the text or way of understanding. Unlike several other methods that encourage student discussion after reading has taken place, QtA takes place as the children read so that, in theory, they are questioning the author's intentions as they construct a model of understanding. In this article, the authors provide a detailed account of the method and report findings from a year-long investigation of the method's impact. During this year, teachers' questioning styles became more deliberate and sophisticated. Teachers were more inclined to ask extension-style questions in QtA lessons. Students learned to use questioning strategies to construct meaning. In response to the question, "What's the author trying to tell us" a significantly higher percentage of students were able to construct meaningful responses after the intervention. Further, students became much better at monitoring their comprehension as they read (p. 407). Questioning the Author lessons also included many more student-initiated questions than baseline lessons in social studies and language arts. This is definitely an intervention that you'll want to learn about!

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 * McKeown, M. G., Beck, I. L., & Blake, R. G. K. (2009). Rethinking reading comprehension instruction: A comparison of instruction for strategies and content approaches. //Reading Research Quarterly, 44(//3//)//, 218-253. doi:10.1598/RRQ.44.3.1 Retrieved from[| http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rrq.2009.44.issue-3/issuetoc]
 * In this article, McKeown, Beck and Blake report findings from a two-year study in which they compared three different reading comprehension instructional methods: (a) strategies instruction, (b) content instruction (using Questioning the Author) and (c) basal instruction. As reported on page 224 of the article, strategies instruction lessons included focus on five specific strategies: summarizing, predicting, drawing inferences, question generation, and comprehension monitoring. At any given "stopping point" as students read, the strategy on which the instructors focused depended on the best fit for the situation. In this way, the strategy instruction was integrated. Content instruction "focused student attention on the content of the text through general, meaning-based questions about the text" (p. 223). At each "stopping point" teachers provided an initiating question to begin a discussion; questions were always designed as open-ended opportunities to explore the most salient idea(s) in a text segment. Basal instruction was driven by the comprehension questions provided by the Teacher's Edition of the basal reader normally used in the school district. Findings were really interesting -- performance on one measure of comprehension in which students had to read a set of sentences and determine whether each is true about the text -- did not differ across groups. However, students who received the content-focused intervention out-performed other students on an oral recall task, suggesting that they remembered more and that the quality of their recalls was of higher quality. Questioning itself doesn't seem to be the key to cmoprehension -- however questions grounded in content with a teacher modelling open-ended questions does seem to support comprehension.


 * Dymock, S., & Nicholson, T. (2010). "High 5!" Strategies to enhance comprehension of expository text. //The Reading Teacher, 64//(3), 166-178. doi:10.1598/RT.64.3.2 Retrieved from []
 * In this article, Dymock & Nicholson review five strategies that have been shown to support comprehension of expository text. Questioning is one of the strategies highlighted in this article. They encourage three types of questions, "right there, think and search and beyond the text" (p. 167). They also encourage questions that permit readers to access background knowledge about the content and the text structure. We like this article because it presents Questioning as one of several effective strategies that support comprehension, including summarizing, creating mental images (visualizing), analyzing text structure, and activating background knowledge.

__Technology Tips and Tools__
**Use Search Engines to Develop Questioning Skills**: Questioning is an essential reading comprehension skill; it is also a foundational skill for reading in online contexts. One way to help children become good questioners is to have them use a Search engine (e.g., Google) to explore answers to the thick and thin questions they have about topics related to the texts they’re exploring offline. Using a search engine to generate information is an extraordinarily complex skill set. First, students need to formulate their question. They need to think about whether it is focused enough and reflect on whether it’s “researchable” as Harvey and Goudvis outline (p. 122). Then, of course, students need to be able to identify the key ideas that will provide the most focused and pertinent information. Have students experiment with different combinations of keywords to see what happens to the search results. Once they have search results, students also need to be able to comb through them to find the resources that will provide the answers they need and requires additional evaluation skills specific to the web. Imagine, though, how rich the learning might be if we added the search engine activity onto the Question Web activity described on page 122. The kids could pool their knowledge in response to the question “Why was it called the underground railroad?” and then leverage this understanding to dig further on the Internet.

**Use a Digital Common Space instead of Chart Paper:** Imagine the power of replacing the chart paper often recommended by Harvey and Goudvis with a digital common space. What if the “large chart” were a class wiki? Or a blog? Or even just a common google doc that you could all access, that could be projected in the classroom, and could be edited in real time by anyone in the class? What if you used the comments feature in Google to note “Ways our schema is changing”? There would be an ongoing archive of the evolution of these thoughts AND it could be shared, repurposed, embedded, linked etc. with SO many others. What a great way to collaborate and to archive the ways that students' questions are developing. Wiki Tools: Wikispaces.com

===__Multimedia Resources __ ===

[|Annenberg Learning]: [|Teaching Diverse Learners Video] [|Teaching Diverse Learners Lesson Series] In this video, teachers demonstrate the gradual release of responsibility model and you can see them implementing many of the questioning strategies that Harvey and Goudvis recommend. If you start around minute 11, you will go directly to the modeling of the questioning. However, the introduction that frames the importance of understanding students' diverse needs is well worth watching!

[|Doing What Works]: [|See How it Works]Teacher Lauren Cottrell uses gradual release of responsibility to model teaching questioning.

Blueribbon Reading -- Questioning (PBS Teachers): [|Lesson Plan] and [|Question Cube Online Interactive Game]. These additional resources could supplement your lesson planning around questioning.