The secret to rigorous and rich student inquiry
This article is part of our series on how to help students use logic and reason to break down problems, evaluate solutions, and inform their interactions with others, and find new ways to solve problems or resolve interpersonal disputes. To learn more about how we teach critical & creative thinking, see here.
A PBL unit normally starts by giving students some exposure to a real-world problem – perhaps through a documentary or video – which gives them some information about and builds their engagement with that real-world problem.
The next step – before we teach any curriculum content – is for students to work through an inquiry process to identify what they know about the problem (whether through the initial hook or from elsewhere) and what they want or need to know. These ‘need to know’ questions are the gateway for the introduction of curriculum content – if we structure the inquiry process correctly, students will ask questions for which the answers lie in the content that we need to teach across this topic. This is part of flipping the learning paradigm to the students ‘wanting’ to learn because they have asked for this information – it will help them better understand the real-world problem, which they need to do to create their solution.
The challenge, of course, is that this approach is predicated on students being able to ask questions – good, relevant questions. If they can’t, the whole inquiry process doesn’t get off the ground. But this is easier said than done – so how do we build the skill of questioning?
We think there are two crucial but simple steps:
Give students a framework for structuring their thinking and questioning
Help students articulate questions through questioning stems and categories
Question frameworks
Students use a Need to Know list to document what they know about the problem or scenario and then what they need to know, which is where the questioning comes in. However, to give them a better chance of asking good questions – and especially questions which can be investigated scientifically – we should structure this process to help them categorise their thoughts.
We use a structure which we call Situation, Impact, Cause, Response (or SICR for short). We think that, when looking at any real-world problem or context, dividing it into these four components is going to help students better understand what they do and don’t know about it. And better understanding what you don’t know about something is a necessary precondition for asking good questions – we think that this is often overlooked. Often, when someone can’t ask good questions, it isn’t only that they don’t know how to – it is actually that they can’t adequately identify the gaps in their knowledge which a question (and subsequently an answer) might fill.
To flesh the SICR components of a problem out a little:
Situation. What are the basic facts of the situation? What indicates that it is a problem?
Impact. Why is this a problem? Is it a big problem or a small problem? What negative impacts might occur if it goes unsolved? Who might be impacted and where might the impacts be felt?
Cause. Why is this problem occurring? What is causing it? Is one cause responsible for more of the problem than others?
Response. How could we respond to this problem? Is anything being done already to solve the problem? How effective is it?
The process we encourage students to take is to identify what they do know about the problem for each of these components. List everything and categorise it. Sure, some pieces of information/knowledge might run across two categories, but by and large it is going to be able to be categorised into one of these components. This creates an entire map of a students’ knowledge, and from here we can start identifying the gaps or holes in what they know. And once we identify the gaps, we can start formulating the questions which, if answered, are going to plug those gaps.
This is the same process we want students to replicate when they are first confronted with a problem. You might be thinking at this point – where’s the questioning!? But that’s the whole point. We can’t expect students to ask good questions unless they first have a mental map of what they do know.
To get to the questioning stage, there are two final things we need to do:
Identify any assumptions. A really important step is for students to check whether they have made any assumptions in outlining what they know. Assumptions are the death of a rigorous inquiry process because they assume the answers are known, which removes the need for questions. So what we want students to do is look at what they have got down and ask – is there anything which I have said that I know which I don’t have evidence for? This assumption may be made on the part of the student. Alternatively, the assumption might be presented in the news source or the stimuli itself.
Identify knowledge gaps. The final step before formulating a question is to identify the knowledge gaps that exist. We get students to do this because it is often too hard for them to jump straight from identifying what they do know to formulating questions to answer what they don’t know. More senior students can do this but, for younger students, a sturdier scaffold is to first get them to identify the things they don’t know and then turn that knowledge gap into a question.
To identify knowledge gaps, students should look at what they have got down for each SICR component and then think about information that they are missing. This is the hard part of an inquiry process and of asking good questions as often students are working in the realm of unknown unknowns – they don’t know what they don’t know. This requires a fair bit of guidance at first.
The easiest way to think about it is this: What would a complete, perfect set of knowledge look like on this problem? And how much of that do we have and how much is missing?
Question stems and categories
Having the knowledge gaps makes it much easier to formulate questions, but some students still struggle with actually articulating this. Even more so, they can find it challenging to ask questions which address a knowledge gap in an open-ended way that invites curiosity and investigation.
A way to help them round this is to give them question stems to formulate their questions, and to encourage them to think through different categories of questions to select the one which is most likely to lead them to the answer. We use two different approaches to this based on a students’ level and their prior experience with inquiry processes.
Level 1 questioning
The first set of question stems we use for younger year levels – what we call Level 1 questioning - is summarised below. As you can see, it helps students ask questions to explore the past, the present, and the future, depending on the construction of their sentence and the wording used.
Each has a different focus and can unlock exploration of a different aspect of the problem:
Who helps students identify stakeholders to the problem (people impacted, the people/organisations causing the problem, or the people working on solutions)
What helps students explore the current situation and the facts that are necessary to form a base understanding of the problem
Where directs students to the location of the problem or the possible implementation of a solution. It narrows their geographical focus
When can function as both an exploration of the origins of the problem or of possible future impacts if the problem is not solved
Why pushes students to look at the causes underlying the problem
How does the same as Why but with the added layer of also helping frame the exploration of possible futures
Level 2 questioning
For older students or for students more adept with the process of generating inquiry questions, there are other categories of questions which they can turn to. These questions are more detailed, more analytical, and allow for a deeper exploration of the knowledge gaps.
Explorative questions force expansion on new points of view and uncovered areas. They encourage students to explore future possibilities or the potential implications of a course of action. They can be framed as a hypothetical question to be pondered.
Question stems include:
What might happen if….?
What are the different ways that we could…?
Would things be different if…?
How would our lives change if…?
Affective questions reveal people’s feelings about something. These questions are especially useful for exploring the impact of a problem or when considering the point of view of different stakeholders.
Question stems include:
How do people feel about….?
Would different people have different opinions on…?
What perspective would… have?
Challenge questions encourage students not to take their beliefs or the information presented to them at face value. They push students to seek verification or disproving evidence for their beliefs and to differentiate from a fact and an opinion.
Question stems include:
How do we know …. is true?
Do you/we agree that …?
Is there any evidence that challenges …?
Could there be another perspective to …?
Probing questions invite a deeper examination of a fact or issue. These are most helpful in facilitating the search of problem causes by looking at they ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of a problem.
Question stems include:
What are the consequences of …?
What might change if …?
What might be affected by …?
Why is … happening?
Analytical questions help students make sense of their learnings. They encourage students to identify patterns and relationships between the information they have gathered/learned. They require students to analyse and prioritise the information by relevance, importance, and reliability. They ultimately help students use their learnings to make actionable decisions.
Question stems include:
How does … contrast with …?
How important is…?
Is there a connection/pattern between …?
What does … mean for …?
Is it always true that …?
Asking good inquiry questions is hard. These questions stems will help your students get started. Once they’re comfortable with that, we can push them further to develop their second-order thinking and create questions which lead to more questions. But that’s for next month’s edition of the Curations newsletter!
Do you know an educator who is interested in learning more about how to build critical & creative thinking skills in students? If so, please share this article with them!
If you are passionate about teaching collaboration and want to learn more, get in touch with us at hello@curaeducation.com. We’re always happy to exchange ideas with our PBL community!