Questioning Techniques: Providing Opportunities for Students to Analyze Situations

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So much of the art of helping students to be successful with educational content requires that we also help them develop the skills that will help them be successful in their personal lives.  Though I will not go into detail about the importance of effective questioning techniques during this post, please visit my first post on questioning (which can be found here) to see why it is one of the most effective tools that can be used to extend students understanding of content and improve their personal lives. 

Providing students with the opportunity to use questioning to analyze experiences and situations allows them to break down information into pieces, make connections to different areas, and look for themes and solutions.



Here are some questions that I have found that force students to move beyond lower level understandings of materials and form connections that drastically increase their knowledge of content.


  • How is this similar to?
  • How could you categorize?
  • What explanation do you have for? 
  • What are the pros and cons?
  • How can the problem/situation be broken down?
  • How is this connected to ?
  • What is the relationship between ?
  • Are there any common threads between ?

A recent website that was shared with me that could also aide in providing opportunities for analysis and discussion in the mathematics classroom is https://www.samebutdifferentmath.com/.  This website provides a picture and asks students to analyze different aspects of the picture.  Below is an example of one of their pictures.  
fractions-same-but-diferent-fraction-of-hexagon.png


I have also seen this done with educators asking their students to write captions for pictures/cartoons and compare and contrast two different pictures/cartoons. 

What are some ways that you have used this or something similar to this?

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