Effect of question-asking training in a college lecture class on learners' attitudes and ability to ask questions

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether various kinds of training in asking questions during a college lecture class would influence the students' attitudes toward asking questions and their ability to ask questions. In the class, the lecturer set up situations in which the students were required to work together in a small group during every lecture to prepare a question and also had to write a question by themselves, and, in addition, required the students to make a small-group presentation once a term. At the beginning and end of the term, the students completed a questionnaire asking about their attitudes toward questioning; they also completed a task in which they were instructed to prepare as many questions as possible about an article that they had read. Across two years of this procedure, the students' attitudes toward questioning and the number of questions asked increased from pretest to posttest. It is important to point out that the increase in the number of questions was not simply an increase in questions asking for facts or in questions for which the asker's purpose was unclear, but rather the increase was in higher-order questions. In order to examine the origins of the increase, the students were divided into 4 groups on the basis of their pretest scores on the attitude questionnaire and the question-preparation task, and pretest-posttest differences between the groups were compared. The results revealed that all the students except those who had scored highest on the pretest showed both an improvement in their attitude toward questioning and an increase in the number of questions prepared.