The effect of teacher questions on elementary school students’ written responses on an online stem platform

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze thousands of elementary school students’ written responses to open-ended questions on an online STEM platform. We found that certain key words in the teachers’ questions, such as “explain”, had a significant effect on the length of the students’ responses and on the type of words used for reasoning. We also found that including emotional words in the teachers’ questions had a significant effect on the emotional content of the students’ responses. These findings have practical implications. They suggest that the use of key words in teachers’ questions is an important element that must be taken into account when planning a class and when designing instructional strategies using online STEM platforms.