Probing Student Understanding With Alternative Questioning Strategies

TL;DR

This paper explores alternative questioning strategies in educational research to better understand student knowledge, revealing that students often select the most common correct answer but struggle to identify it spontaneously.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates three underused question types to access different student knowledge and reasoning skills in science education.

Findings

Students often choose the most common correct answer.

Students can explain correct answers but do not spontaneously identify them.

Different question types reveal varied student reasoning patterns.

Abstract

Common research tasks ask students to identify a correct answer and justify their answer choice. We propose expanding the array of research tasks to access different knowledge that students might have. By asking students to discuss answers they may not have chosen naturally, we can investigate students' abilities to explain something that is already established or to disprove an incorrect response. The results of these research tasks also provide us with information about how students' responses vary across the different tasks. We discuss three underused question types, their possible benefits and some preliminary results from an electric circuits pretest utilizing these new question types. We find that the answer students most commonly choose as correct is the same choice most commonly eliminated as incorrect. Also, students given the correct answer can provide valuable reasoning to explain it, but they do not spontaneously identify it as the correct answer.