How to design open-ended questions? : Literature review

Abstract

There are two types of questions that teachers can use in the learning process, that is closed-ended and open-ended questions, but only open-ended questions that can stimulate the students to develop their higher-order thinking skills. Although this type of question has an important function for students, it turns out the questions contained in the textbook are still in the form of closed-ended questions and to design open-ended questions takes a lot of time and effort. Therefore, a literature study is needed to find simple strategies that can be used to design open-ended questions. Based on the findings, there are 5 strategies that can be used to design open-ended question, namely modifying closed-ended questions, working backward, design the questions to determine “who is correct?”, using the problem-posing principle and design the questions to determine “what’s wrong with this?”. The results of this literature review also found that open-ended questions can also be used to identify students’ conceptual understanding, reasoning and misconception.