Asking Questions...The Heart of Science

Student questions fill the Driving Question Board

Science begins with questions. Our students are naturally curious, and always have questions about what they see happening in the world. It is our job as teachers to harness that curiosity and teach students how to focus it, so that they can make sense of the world around them.

The Science & Engineering Practices(SEP) were written with the intent of interconnecting and overlapping. Although the eight practices are written to sequentially unfold, the intent is they also overlap with each other as you move through the sequence. You may also end up circling back and revisiting any SEP when it fits your purpose. The SEP of Asking Questions was put first with the intention of students understanding that scientists start with a question, before engaging in experimentation. The purpose of doing experiments is to answer a question.

This year we have made students questions front and center with our Driving Question Boards in the labs. We have used the Question Formulation Technique from The Right Question Institute to create a strong Question Focus that will focus student thinking around a specific phenomena. But, the process can take a long time. In taking a Master Teacher mini-course with Lisa Brosnick (a past STANYS president, Master Teacher Emeritus, and phenomenal science teacher in North Collins), I realized that there are ways that QFT process can be modified based on my goals. Students need to be taught to write good questions that connect to the focus. Lisa shared the wonderful idea of collecting student questions over their shoulders as they write, or making up questions to use for the sort. When creating questions, make up some that do not fit. When sorting questions, let students know there are questions that do not connect to our focus, and challenge the students to find them. This would allow students to focus on "What makes a good question?"

Normally, when I do the Question Focus Technique every student writes 10 questions on their own. Then they share with everyone at their table, and the table comes to consensus on the top 3 questions they feel are most important to answer. It is amazing, and I will still use this technique when I teach and time permits. But, this week when I was launching a new unit with the phenomena, and the discussion took longer than I had planned, due to amazing student discussions. I knew I would not have time to get questions to the DQB using the traditional method. So, as students wrote their questions, I read over their shoulders and recorded some of the questions that I knew would drive my experiments for the unit, and I threw in some oddball questions, that connected to the topic, but not the focus. For example, we were focused on the effect hill height has on the motion of roller coaster cars. So one disconnected question was "Who invented roller coasters?". This was an actual question other classes had written.

Student written questions fill the board when we have time for the whole process.

After a few minutes of writing their own questions, I had students join me at our DQB, to sort the questions by Cross Cutting Concepts. I told students about the bad questions that were hidden in my pile of their questions and challenged the students to find them. Our discussions took on a different purpose! Students were focused on making sure the question fit the purpose and then to which CCC it connected.

Students now had the understanding that we ask questions for a specific purpose, and the question we ask can lead us to answers! Students still had ownership of the questions, calling out "Hey, that's mine!" when they recognized a question I shared. And, when these questions are pulled to plan and conduct experiments later in the unit, students will know the questions we are answering came from them.

Just another technique that is allowing our science labs to continue to evolve!