A Strategy for Productive Teachers' Questioning in Chemistry Class: Disassembly, Assembly and Interweave of Questions

Questioning forms an integral part of most strategies for effective teaching when the class consists of difficult content. Science including chemistry is usually content-rich, but difficult to understand without supporting lab experiments, subsidiary visual materials and model kits. Engaging the attention and interest of students in such a subject, therefore, is the key to the success of a daily lesson in the classroom. However, generating meaningful questions requires a certain level of information and metacognitive skills on the part of the teacher. The purpose of this study was to find out the framework of effective teachers' questioning with a large group in chemistry class: how teachers used questioning to engage their students in such a big class, to identify a variety of forms of feedback provided by students and to develop a model of question-inducing strategies. We investigated the teachers' recognition of their questioning and the students' recognition of teachers' questioning by surveying over 82 teachers and 434 students in Korea. The survey findings show that the questionnaire can be categorized into four elements: the theme of the teachers' questions (T), students' inquiries (I), methods of teachers' questioning (M) and encouragement of students (E). These elements can be analyzed and sub-categorized to find out which elements are effective in good questioning, even though the elements are interwoven tetrahedrally.