The Use of Open Ended versus Closed Ended Questions in Turkish Classrooms

Hamide Çakır,Özge Cengiz

doi:10.4236/ojml.2016.62006

Abstract

Asking students good questions is a critical tool for developing their skills. In particular, open ended questions are believed to be useful for developing students’ cognitive skills, as these questions encourage them to express and elaborate upon their thinking, and provide rationales for their thoughts (Lee, Kinzie, & Whittaker, 2012). Open ended questions are likely to engage children in higher-order thinking (Roth, 1996) and usually involve reasoning and judgment (Hargreaves, 1984). Within this context, this study is an attempt to explore how a training program on open ended questions encourages teachers to improve their classroom practices. In particular, this cross-sectional study focuses on Turkish teachers’ questioning strategies, and aims to explore how Turkish teachers benefit from open ended questions in their classes, depending on their experience, gender and the grade of their classes, and to what extent their use of open ended questions differentiate after a training program. At the start of the study, teachers who were teaching Turkish to different grades at different schools were video-recorded in their classes with their students. After the recordings, a teacher training program on the roles and types of question was given to teachers in order to develop their awareness about open ended questions that they use in their classrooms. Following the training, teachers were recorded in their classes in the same way again. Finally, after the discourse transcription, the teachers’ questions were classified as open or closed ended, and a comparison of the data recorded before and after the training was designed to determine whether the training course had positive effects on teachers’ use of open ended questions. The results of this study indicate that the training encouraged teachers to adopt a more systematic and reflective pedagogical practice. After training, the teachers asked more open ended questions which resulted in more student participation, thus there was more dialogue in the classrooms.

Highlights

Education is fundamentally a process of human interaction, and classroom discourse constitutes the mechanism through which interaction takes place (Nystrand, Gamoran, & Carbonaro, 2001)
Keeping in mind that one of the aims of this study is to try to create a change in teachers’ classroom practices, in particular, in their use of open ended questions; this study tries to achieve an answer to the following question: What, if any, is the effect of a training program about open ended questions on teachers’ questioning behaviors in their classrooms in terms of the following criteria: 1) Teacher experience, 2) Teacher gender, 3) Class level
In the present study Wilcoxon and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests were performed on the pre- and post-test scores separately to examine if mean differences were significant in terms of open ended question use, gender, experience, and class level before and after completing the training program

Summary

Introduction

Education is fundamentally a process of human interaction, and classroom discourse constitutes the mechanism through which interaction takes place (Nystrand, Gamoran, & Carbonaro, 2001). Studies of classroom discourse recognize that the question of how much teachers talk is important, but what is important is how effective teachers are in facilitating learning and promoting interaction in their classroom through the type of questions they ask (see Nunan, 1989). Researchers focus on classroom discourse in order to find out what happens in the classroom (Carter & Nunan, 2001) What all of these studies have in common is that analyzing the features classroom discourse is necessary to see how effectively they can facilitate learning Since developing students’ higher-order thinking is important, teachers’ instruction styles play important role in the initiation of teacher talk in spoken classroom discourse studies. Analyzing the nature of teacher questions can provide teachers with valuable insight on how different types of questions affect the learning outcome (Cullen, 1998; Walsh, 2006)

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Conclusion