Why Would You Say Goodnight to the Moon? Response of Young Intellectually Gifted Children to Lower and Higher Order Questions During Storybook Reading

Abstract

Research into the effect of questions asked during storybook reading in preschool settings has rarely investigated questions that elicit higher order thinking. In the current study, Blank et al.’s Four Levels of Abstraction were used to code teacher questions and child responses from 177 individual storybook reading sessions with eight intellectually gifted 3- and 4-year-old children. The aim was to investigate the level of cognitive response gifted preschoolers made to lower and higher order questions during shared book reading. As expected, lower order questions, the most frequent form of teacher questions, elicited mainly lower order responses. Significant cognitive correspondence was also found for higher order questions, which elicited higher order child responses 88% of the time. This suggests that higher order questioning would be a valuable addition to preschool storybook reading, particularly to extend the thinking of young intellectually gifted children.