Five Basic Types of Questions

What types of questions are you asking students?

The art of asking questions is an ancient part of good teaching and one of the basic
skills all teachers should be able to master. Socrates believed that knowledge and
awareness were an intrinsic part of each learner. Thus, in exercising the craft of good
pedagogy a skilled educator must reach into learners hidden levels of knowing and
awareness in order to help the them reach new levels of thinking through thoughtfully
developed questions.
As you examine the categories below, reflect on your own educational experiences and
see if you can ascertain which types of questions were used most often by your different
teachers. Hone your questioning skills by practicing asking different types of questions,
and try to monitor your teaching so that you include varied levels of questioning skills.
Specifically in the area of Socratic questioning techniques, there are a number of sites
on the Web which might prove helpful, simply use Socratic questioning as a descriptor.
1. Factual - Soliciting reasonably simple, straight forward answers based on obvious
facts or awareness. These are usually at the lowest level of cognitive (thinking) or
affective (feeling) processes and answers are frequently either right or wrong.
Example: Name the Shakespeare play about the Prince of Denmark?
2. Convergent Answers to these types of questions are usually within a very finite
range of acceptable accuracy. These may be at several different levels of cognition
comprehension, application, analysis, or ones where the answerer makes inferences or
conjectures based on personal awareness, or on material read, presented or known.
While these types of questions are valuable in exercising mid-level cognitive thinking
skills, it is quite easy to expand students cognitive processes even higher by adding
another layer to these questions whereby teachers ask students to justify their answers
in light of the evidence offered or the inferences made.
Example: On reflecting over the entirety of the play Hamlet, what were the main
reasons why Ophelia went mad? (This is not specifically stated in one direct statement
in the text of Hamlet. Here the reader must make simple inferences as to why she
committed suicide.)
3. Divergent These questions allow students to explore different avenues and create
many different variations and alternative answers or scenarios. Correctness may be
based on logical projections, may be contextual, or arrived at through basic knowledge,
conjecture, inference, projection, creation, intuition, or imagination. These types of
questions often require students to analyze, evaluate, or synthesize a knowledge base
and then project or predict different outcomes. Answering these types of questions may
be aided by higher levels of affective thinking as well such as valuing, organization,

or characterization. Responses to these types of questions generally fall into a wide

array of acceptability. Often correctness is determined subjectively based on the
possibility or probability of the proposed answer. The intent of these types of questions
is to stimulate imaginative, creative, or inventive thought, or investigate cause and
effect relationships.
Example: In the love relationship of Hamlet and Ophelia, what might have happened to
their relationship and their lives if Hamlet had not been so obsessed with the revenge of
his fathers death?
4. Evaluative - These types of questions usually require sophisticated levels of
cognitive and/or emotional (affective) judgment. In attempting to answer these types of
questions, students may be combining multiple cognitive and/or affective processes or
levels, frequently in comparative frameworks. Often an answer is analyzed at multiple
levels and from different perspectives before the answerer arrives at newly synthesized
information or conclusions.
Examples:
a. Compare and contrast the death of Ophelia with that of Juliet?
b. What are the similarities and differences between Roman gladiatorial games and
modern football?
c. Why and how might the concept of Piagetian schema be related to the concepts
presented in Jungian personality theory, and why might this be important to consider in
teaching and learning?
5. Combinations These are questions that blend any combination of the above.
You can easily monitor what types of questions you are asking your students through
simple tallies and examining degrees of difficulty. Or, if your students are older, then ask
them to monitor the types of questions you ask, allowing them to identify the types. For
those of you who might be a bit more collaborative or adventurous in your teaching and
want to give students some ownership in their educational processes, challenge them to
create course related questions to ask one another. In my many years of teaching I was
always pleasantly surprised at what students came up with.

Convergent questions have only one

correct answer, and test rote knowledge of
concrete facts. Examples of these
questions include multiple choice,
definitions, true/false, fill in the blank and
calculations where there is only one correct
answer.
Divergent questions have no single
correct answer, and are more analytical,
testing the students ability to synthesize
information, offer educated opinions or
create hypotheses based on their
knowledge. These types of questions are
always open-ended, allowing the students
to express themselves as they demonstrate
their ability to reason in the subject.
These types of questioning fit very nicely with Blooms taxonomy of the cognitive
domain (below), which outlines a sort of hierarchy of learning (Bloom, Engelhart, Frost,
Hill & Krathwohl, 1956). In reality, it should be remembered that while mastering the
earlier, low-level skills in the hierarchy is beneficial to mastering the latter ones, it is not
necessary to do so, and that students will often work at more than one level
simultaneously.
With respect to question types, convergent questions are easily paired with the first
three classifications of the taxonomy, while divergent questions apply more to the last
three classifications of thinking (Woolfolk, Winne, & Perry, 2003).

Table 1: Blooms Taxonomy and Questioning Types

Category
Knowledge

Memory and Reasoning

Objectives
Remembering or
recognizing something
without necessarily
understanding, using, or

Type of Questioning
Convergent: Recalling or
recognizing information as learned.

changing it.

Comprehension

Understanding the
material being
communicated without
necessarily relating it to
anything else.

Convergent: Demonstrating
understanding of the materials;
transforming, reorganizing, or
interpreting.

Application

Using a general concept

to solve a problem.

Convergent: Using information to

solve a problem with a single
correct answer.

Analysis

Breaking something down

into its parts.

Divergent: Critical thinking;

identifying reasons and motives;
making inferences based on
specific data; analyzing conclusions
to see if supported by evidence.

Synthesis

Creating something new

by combining different
ideas.

Divergent: Original thinking; original

plan, proposal, design or story.

Evaluation

Judging the value of

materials
or methods as they might
be applied in a particular
situation.

Divergent: Judging the merits of

ideas, offering opinions, applying
standards.

Skewed Data
Data can be "skewed", meaning it tends to have a long tail on one
side or the other:

Negative Skew

No Skew

Positive Skew

Negative Skew?
Why is it called negative skew? Because the long "tail" is on the
negative side of the peak.
People sometimes say it is "skewed to the left" (the long tail is on
the left hand side)
The mean is also on the left of the peak.

The Normal Distribution has

No Skew
A Normal Distribution is not
skewed.
It is perfectly symmetrical.
And the Mean is exactly at the peak.

Positive Skew
And positive skew is when the long tail
is on the positive side of the peak, and
some people say it is "skewed to the
right".
The mean is on the right of the peak
value.

Example: Income Distribution

Here is some data I extracted from a recent Census.As you can
see it is positively skewed ... in fact the tail continues way past
$100,000