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Evaluation and Assessment

Formative Questions

Author Post
Jessica Nguyen Jessica Nguyen 1155 Points

What are ways I can create a variety of formative questions that involve critical thinking for my students during science lessons? I am using different Bloom's stems, but all my questions seem to be one note and somewhat boring. How can I create questions that are probing and deeper?

Susan Macsotai Susan Macsotai 1455 Points

I try to follow Blooms taxonomy when formulating questions. I also use the What, Then What, So What technique. In other words I start with an easy question and build on the questions. There are several benefits to this process. It challenges the higher end students and it allows you to pinpoint where in the concepts the students are struggling. If you simply start with the high end questions you loose the lower students. If you stick to only the low end questions you loose the higher achieving students.

Susan Macsotai Susan Macsotai 1455 Points

I try to follow Blooms taxonomy when formulating questions. I also use the What, Then What, So What technique. In other words I start with an easy question and build on the questions. There are several benefits to this process. It challenges the higher end students and it allows you to pinpoint where in the concepts the students are struggling. If you simply start with the high end questions you loose the lower students. If you stick to only the low end questions you loose the higher achieving students.

Treva Keller Treva Keller 1090 Points

Have you looked at the DOK (Depth of Knowledge) question stems? The questions are categorized by levels and content.

Carolyn Mohr Carolyn Mohr 92616 Points

I, too, like to have a copy of Bloom's verbs and questions stems handy to help me formulate probing questions. I have also found Page Keeley's Probes on hundreds of different topics to be very helpful to begin meaningful discussions. She begins with a probing question. Here teacher notes are very detailed and help the teacher to see what kinds of misconceptions students might have on a particular concept/topic. I also like using discrepant events to begin a lesson. Many of the discrepant events mentioned in various articles in the learning center provide guiding questions to ask while presenting the discrepant event.

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