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Acadly is a Student Response System and Attendance Automation platform. Professors can use it to boost engagement inside the classroom, share activities, and automate attendance using Acadly’s unique mesh-network technology.

You can read about all the ways in which you can use Acadly inside the classroom here.

So, why does the quality of questions matter?

Because not only do great questions help learning, bad ones can stifle it as well. This is backed by research, and is also intuitive; from a student’s perspective, their job is to answer the questions they are asked. If the only way your questions can be answered is, say, by rote learning, then that’s what you will see students doing.

What’s a good question to ask students?

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of questions: lower-order and higher-order, a distinction based on the cognitive functions they utilize (as defined by good old Bloom’s Taxonomy)

Lower-order questions require remembering , understanding & applying

, & Higher-order questions require analyzing, evaluating & creating

Despite the unflattering name, lower-order questions are not useless or undesirable. When asked at the right time, they may be exactly what’s needed. In other words, what’s a “good” question depends on the desired learning outcomes.

Most professors ask more lower-order questions

While lower-order questions are useful, as a rule of thumb professors should try to ask more higher-order ones. However, it has been noted that most professors ask way more lower-order questions (1, 2) than higher-order ones, and that’s not good news.

So how does one frame a higher-order question?

There are several academic frameworks and taxonomies that focus on this very question.

Bloom’s Taxonomy, as discussed above

The Socratic method (source)

A classification based on knowledge dimensions (source)

The question circles method (source)

The Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) framework

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The Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) framework

The QAR framework is amazing for didactic subjects and disciplines, but with a little bit of thought, it extends neatly to problem-based disciplines like STEM education too.