Anlamaya Yönelik Nasıl Sorular Soruyoruz?

Abstract

What Kinds of Questions Do We Ask for Making Meaning?. The aim of this study was to determine fourth and fifth grade elementary classroom teachers’ personal preferences toward questioning and their questioning skills according to an expository text and a narrative text given. A total of 123 elementary classroom teachers constituted the research sample. With the questionnaire form, the teachers’ opinions about what points they consider when they ask question to students, whether or not they consider textbooks as a source or they try to reach new questioning sources, and their personnel preferences about answer sources when they ask question, were taken at first. Then, the teachers prepared five questions for the each text chosen from Turkish language arts textbooks. All questions written by the teachers were classified according to Barrett’s Taxonomy and sources of answers. Also, the teachers’ opinions about questioning were analyzed. The research findings revealed that the teachers need to get involved in professional development seminars to improve their questioning skills. Additionally, the most of the teachers’ questions, which were prepared in accordance with the texts chosen, were classified as literal comprehension questions which require lower order thinking and comprehension skills, and these questions just focused on recall of information (retrieving) on the texts. According to the present study findings, the majority of the teachers use questions in teacher edition books and they rarely prepare new questions instead of using teacher edition book as a source.