September 9, 2024, by Rupert Knight

Higher-order questions or questioning for higher-order thinking?

In this post, I contrast higher-order questions with questioning for higher-order thinking and suggest some principles for developing this aspect of practice.

Why ask questions?

Let’s imagine a visit to a Year 5 class where pupils have been studying Roman Britain for the last few weeks. It’s the penultimate lesson in the unit and time to put all of that knowledge to work. The teacher stops the class to pose a question. What happens next? What might they ask and why?

Well, we know that there are lots of purposes for classroom questioning. Some of them are managerial in nature. The teacher might, for example, ask a rhetorical question as a reminder about routines (“What do we do in this classroom to show we are listening?”) or something to do with organisation (“Is there anyone without a partner?”)

In terms of questioning to promote learning, however, we might identify two broad purposes:

1. checking or consolidating knowledge and understanding

2. deepening thinking and understanding

Both are essential, but the majority of the focus in schools seems to be on the first of these two.

As a starting point, for example, the DfE’s Early Career Framework, as a specification of the expertise for beginning teachers, states that ‘questions can be used for many purposes, including to check pupils’ prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems.’ This list seems consistent with a prevailing focus on retrieving, consolidating and checking children’s knowledge with a view to its long-term retention.  This is an emphasis reflected in the enduring popularity of lists like Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction with its reminder to ‘ask large numbers of questions and check the responses of all students’ and to ‘check for student understanding’.

Perhaps, in our Year 5 history lesson, the teacher is going to ask some specific factual questions about Roman villas or something more open about the legacies we still find around us today. Doing so will give valuable information about next steps and may serve as a form of retrieval to aid retention of key facts. Ascertaining and securing knowledge is important, of course.  There has been lots of attention paid to streamlining efficient question and answer routines, but it can sometimes seem that this is at the expense of that other broad purpose for questioning.

Asking questions is also a way of growing children’s understanding by promoting deeper thinking. At the heart of ‘higher-order’ thinking, therefore, is an intention get the pupils in this class to do something with this knowledge base about the Romans: to apply their knowledge to a novel task.  David Perkins, for example, has written about developing habits around questioning to make thinking visible.

Here’s where it’s tempting to start classifying questions with a view to identifying ‘higher order’ questions. But what is a higher order question?

What do we mean by higher-order questions?

In the interests of pace and precision, lots of questions designed for factual recall tend to be closed.  So are higher-order questions simply more open questions? Not necessarily. As Peter Worley points out, there is a difference between grammatical openness and conceptual openness.

”What can you tell me about Roman Britain?” is a grammatically open question, suggesting a range of possible answers, but conceptually fairly closed because, as Worley argues, it ‘contains or invites no tensions, conflicts or controversies’, It is therefore not particularly likely to generate deep thinking.

Perhaps it is more helpful to go beyond categorisation as open or closed by exploring things like:

• divergent questions (seeking diverse interpretations and responses);

• speculative questions (going beyond what is known to the hypothetical);

• command terms like some of the verbs in Bloom’s Taxonomy (synthesise, analyse, apply, etc.)

• moving towards the abstract (drawing on specific experiential knowledge to think more generally)

“What if the Romans had never come to Britain?” seems to be a pretty good question by these standards. Its speculative nature invites the controversy we’d associate with something conceptually open and it also requires application and synthesis of knowledge to a multitude of end points.

However, this focus on the question itself as the indicator of ‘higher-order’ may be missing the point.

Quite apart from the danger that some questions come to be seen as more important than others (potentially devaluing those securing the pre-requisite knowledge base), this is a decontextualised view of what is going on. So, here’s another speculative question:

What if we broadened our unit of analysis to questioning rather than questions?

Should we focus on questioning rather than questions?

Adam Boxer’s 2024 blog, raises this very issue of whether we can label a question ‘higher order’ in any meaningful way. His contention is that the level of a question is dependent on factors beyond the wording itself, specifically:

• Task quantity: the number of steps or degree of complexity of a question

• Abstraction: the degree to which a question requires the learner to go beyond direct experience

• Domain knowledge: the amount of relevant knowledge the learner has available

• Support: the amount of support provided for the learner

I would go even further and suggest that it may be more productive to think about questioning as a process, rather than questions themselves. By this I mean that the challenge and deepening of understanding lies not only in the question and contextual factors like those above, but also in what happens next – or the whole episode of interaction.

We can think of questioning, therefore, as a process and perhaps it is helpful to consider it as a core practice, an idea discussed in this previous blog in the series. Core practices are frequently occurring and powerful moves used by teachers with a focus not on scripted, micro-level routines, but on the complexity and judgment associated with teaching.  So, here our practice is questioning for higher-order thinking – the word ‘for’ reminding us of the purpose driving the practice – and our focus is on the sequence of judgments involved.

How might we think about questioning for higher-order thinking?

One useful reference point here is the work of Martin Nystrand, Arthur Applebee and colleagues in the US. In their large-scale analyses of classroom language correlated with literacy performance, three features of language were associated with attainment gains:

1. Authentic questions (those without a pre-specified answer)

2. Open discussion (an opportunity for free exchange of ideas)

3. Uptake (teachers building on pupils’ responses and establishing connections)

So, while conceptually open questions are important – not least because they signal that the teacher is genuinely interested in what children think – it is really the questioning practice as a whole which determines their ‘authenticity’. This is commonly thought of as a process involving three turns, or moves: an initiation, some form of processing or response and then a teacher follow-up.

There are many ways to seek pupils’ responses, but when questioning for higher-order thinking, it may be less important to hear from all children or to somehow systematically sample from particular groups. Giving an opportunity to pause for thought and to rehearse ideas first, perhaps by making some individual notes or trying out ideas in the relative safety of small groups might be more appropriate than only ‘cold calling’ or seeking quick-fire brief answers from as many as possible. All of this can help to create an environment for recognising and constructively engaging with differing perspectives: what Rupert Wegerif refers to as opening up dialogic space.

Other research confirms that the third turn is an especially powerful moment. Christine Howe and colleagues, for example, associate attainment gains with moves based on querying (“But do you think that all Romans lived in houses like that?”) and elaboration (“Can anyone build on Rav’s point about place names? What else might they reveal?”). Indeed, there are lots of possible teacher turns here which go beyond a simple evaluative comment, including asking children to ask their own follow-up questions. Sarah Michaels and Cathy O’Connor give a helpful list of nine ‘talk moves’ to serve a variety of goals. For example:

• Seeking evidence

• Offering a counter-example

• Asking a pupil to explain what a peer meant

As another way of thinking about questioning as a process, we can return to Peter Worley’s work on open and closed questions. Worley argues that grammatically open questions (“What can you tell me about Roman Britain?”) often lack focus and specificity. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they may not deepen the thinking or move learning on in a purposeful way. He suggests, therefore, sometimes starting with a grammatically closed but conceptually open question and then opening up the dialogue with an invitation to elaborate in some way. In our scenario, we might imagine initial questions like the following:

“Did Britain benefit from the arrival of the Romans?”

“Was it possible for a woman to be a leader in Britain in Roman times?”

The closed phrasing of these questions will probably yield a simple yes or no response, initially. However, there is still a sense of authenticity in the ambiguity of the issues they address and the deepening of thought can then be prompted through the subsequent moves around open discussion and uptake. For example, here is another initiation and follow-up:

“Should the Romans have stayed in Britain even longer? Take a moment to think about your answer…now tell the person next to you and see if you agree about all your reasons.”

[Partner talk]

“Emily says yes. Did your partner agree with you, Emily?”

[Emily’s turn]

“I see and what was your evidence for saying yes? Did you have exactly the same ideas?”

[Emily’s turn]

“Yes, I see what you mean about all the other things they could have achieved.  I wonder, though, if we could also think more widely about the Roman Empire and take ourselves beyond just thinking about Britain.”

Is this a more holistic view of questioning practice?

In thinking of questioning in this way, we are complementing brief checks of individual understanding with more sustained collective episodes of dialogue. They will be episodes full of contingent judgments in response to emerging ideas but nevertheless ones that can be broken into a number of partly planned-for moves.  The focus here has been on questioning as a practice, rather than questions as discrete units of focus.

Finally, in offering this counterpoint to the more familiar practices of questioning to elicit or consolidate knowledge, two caveats are important. In making its argument, this post has made a deliberate distinction between two broad purposes for questioning. Firstly, in everyday classroom reality, this is of course a somewhat artificial division. Questioning which promotes thinking also reveals existing knowledge, while questioning to check knowledge may yield new insights for learning. Similarly, the very term ‘higher-order’ suggests another unhelpful over-simplification. As critics of Bloom’s Taxonomy like Ron Berger have noted, models and labels which conceptualise learning as discrete processes or as a hierarchy risk overlooking the complex, simultaneous and reciprocal processes which underpin work in classrooms.

What questions would open up the dialogue in your classrooms?

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