A small group of young pupils centers around their teacher on the floor and listens patiently. After pointing out the colour yellow once, the teacher asks the kids to find other yellow coloured objects in the room. The pupils quickly find a variety of yellow coloured items. Before getting bored of the activity, the teacher directs them to the craft table asking: “what other items can you think of that are yellow? Go and draw or craft them.”

The Origin of the Theory Behind the Questioning Techniques

There has been a major transition in teaching methods at schools and nurseries. More and more teachers focus on the above illustrated child-initiative approach rather than the conventional teacher-led approach in order to improve pupils’ engagement with the educational material covered in class and to support them in constructing their own higher-level knowledge. Asking children questions and waiting for them to come up with answers is the central idea of this approach.

Copyright: Syda Productions

The educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom was the first researcher who took learning to another level by arguing that children could improve their knowledge skills when they were asked to answer more critical questions by their teachers. In 1956, he developed a hierarchy of questions which would enable teachers to measure and organise their teaching objectives by using six different levels of questioning: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating. He called this hierarchy the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Bloom proposed that all human beings follow an imaginary ranking of levels when it comes to the complexity of thought. This means that children start to operate at a very “concrete” level of knowledge before they move on to be able to “comprehend” what the facts are. At the next level, children are able to “apply” what they have learned from facts and comprehension. This is the stage where they can demonstrate knowledge and apply it to related situations. Moving on, children can “analyse” what they know such as categorizing information. At the two highest stages of “synthesising” and “evaluating”, Bloom suggested that children are able to form solutions and make judgments about information and situations.

Bloom’s Revised Levels of Questioning in the Classroom

In the early 1990s, researchers revised the taxonomy to make the theory more relevant to the needs of children in today’s world. They decided to add an additional step to the hierarchy called creating while deleting the level of synthesising.

When asking teachers about their preferred activities in class, many will answer that they try to engage young pupils by using Bloom’s questioning techniques. The main idea is that the difficulty of the questions increases by each level. The higher-level questions require deeper thinking and can help children to expand their knowledge on topics or improve their thinking skills.

Copyright: Monkey Business Images

Parents and teachers can track the progress preschoolers make easily. They only have to observe pupils’ ability to answer a question of the next level of knowledge. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), three year olds usually operate at the most basic level of the hierarchy being referred to as concrete thinkers. This means that they concentrate on physical things that are right in front of them. Older children will have the ability to move along the hierarchy to stages that allow abstract ways of thinking. Most children at that age of four engage in more imagination-focused playing activities such as fantasising that a spoon is a wooden stick. Therefore, preschoolers should be able to answer more complicated questions than younger children.

When applying Bloom’s questioning techniques in the classroom, some three year olds and most four year olds are able to follow abstract concepts of thinking including analysing, evaluating and creating. The NAEYC recommends that parents and teachers should not be concerned if some children may not be able to answer higher-level questions. This is because children develop at different rates and may need longer to develop more abstract levels of thinking.

Asking Children Questions Outside the Classroom

When it comes to developing better thinking skills, parents can support their children in the same way teachers do in the classroom. A good starting point is by keeping a record of how frequently children have to answer questions and whether there is a good variation in the levels of the questions asked. It is important that children have a solid base of information when answering questions. Therefore, it can be helpful to ask children basic questions after reading a story in a book which supplies the necessary background. It is also possible to encourage children to answer more difficult questions to make progress. Even if children may not be able to answer the question correctly their answers may still be surprising.

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Web-based open courses are leading a change in disseminating the knowledge and transforming society at large. The SocialEDU is a new education initiative led by EdX and Facebook that aims to provide students in Rwanda with free access to a collaborative online learning experience.

There has never been a better time to get an education. Years ago, looking at the American college options from a war-torn Serbia, it was difficult to access any learning materials online. Courses reviewing the GRE, GMAT and TOEFL tests were not available even in traditional classrooms in Belgrade. For many, the doors of the world class universities remained forever closed.

With the development of online technologies, quality education is getting more available to a global audience. From various test preparation courses to poetry, finance and entrepreneurship classes, it seems the whole world now is going online to get an education.

These days, I am at the Yale Broadcast & Media Center filming an online lecture series in The  Moral Foundations  of Politics for Coursera with legendary political theorist, Dr. Ian Shapiro. It will produce a wonderful opportunity for students around the world with nothing but a wifi connection to get a sense of what it’s like to be in a Yale classroom. Exposure to the ideas and teaching methods of the most influential thinkers will be a mind opening experience Online learning is driving educational mobility to a global level.

Open Education: Democratization via Coursera and EdX

The world of educational technology continues to develop rapidly. Web-based open courses are leading an innovative change in disseminating knowledge around the world. Over the past few years, several Ivy League universities have started with Open courses. Yale, Stanford and MIT have all used technology to produce video recordings of their most prominent faculty members lectures. A step in a new direction was a creation of unified online learning platforms such as Coursera and EdX.

Coursera was founded by two Stanford University professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng who united around a shared vision for utilizing technology to expand educational opportunities worldwide. The other online learning platform, EdX was founded by Harvard and MIT. Recently, EdX partnered with Facebook to create the SocialEDU that aims to provide students in Rwanda with free access to a collaborative online education experiences. Facebook and EdX want to use the power of online social tools to help students reach their educational goals. This has all served to illustrate how new technologies and educational initiatives can potentially tackle inequalities and transform societies.

Low cost access to knowledge

While the costs of traditional education are increasing, the expansion of online learning is simultaneously taking place. Online education provides opportunities to people who may not otherwise have access to a university-level education to enhance their skills. For example, Open Learning Initiative offers online courses to anyone who wants to learn and teach. One of their goals is to provide tangible credit bearing opportunities to students in order to reduce the burden of college debt and make it more feasible for people to complete their degrees or go back to school.

Whether one seeks to go deeper into a particular subject or learn something entirely new, technology allows for an immediate access to knowledge at any place and time. I am talking to Sean Lip, one of the developers of Oppia-a newly released tool for creating interactive online activities that enable students to learn by doing- about how the whole platform came to be.

“From previous teaching experience, I’ve found that students learn better when they have opportunities to demonstrate their understanding. However, when I tried to create some interactive learning material online some time ago, I could not find a tool that made it easy for me to do this. This is how Oppia came about: it’s an open-source project that allows people to create interactive educational activities that allow others to learn by doing. I think one of the ways technology can help most in education is by making it possible for students to access educational experiences which otherwise wouldn’t be available to them. The oppia.org  exists to make it easy for people to construct interactive educational activities and share them with the world, and to allow these activities to be collaboratively improved so that they can become increasingly useful for learners over time,” says Sean Lip.

Look into the Future: is Technology the Answer?

New developments in online learning, interactive textbooks, and open educational resources have significant strategic implications for educational enterprise. The question many are raising is whether or not online learning can replace face-to-face campus experience. However, the purpose of technologies is not to replace the traditional education but to enhance it. Communications tools such as e-mail and online discussion forums, allow students to post their reading responses. Synchronous technologies such as webcasting, interactive video content, and chat rooms help approximate face-to-face learning experiences while allowing students to learn at their own pace.

Through experimentation and measurement of educational online platforms, better ways of teaching could be developed over time. As technology develops, we can expect to see a growing trend in the translation of online lectures into more and more world languages.

Ours is the digital age. We date online, read online, shop online, and make friends online. Why then would innovation in teaching, learning and research be an exception to that? Meet me in the worldwide classroom.

Photos (CC)

1. NYC #3  by Thomas Leuthard
2. ï £ ¿/  by Thomas Leuthard
3. Clever Girl  by liquene

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