This study aimed to empirically verify the educational effects of the ‘Questioning Schools’ pilot program as a measure to foster learner agency in response to rapidly changing uncertainty and the development of AI technology. The research questions examined (1) improvement in students’ questioning ability before and after participation, (2) differences in improvement according to background variables (gender, school level, and regional scale), and (3) differences according to types of specific tasks in the pilot schools. The subjects were 7,882 elementary, middle, and high school students in the 2024 ‘Questioning Schools’ pilot program, and pre- and post-test data were collected using a self-diagnostic instrument and analyzed through paired-samples t-tests, three-way ANOVA, multiple regression, and mixed ANOVA. Results showed that students’ questioning ability significantly improved across all groups, with the greatest change in knowledge of questioning methods. All main and interaction effects were significant except for the interaction between gender and regional scale, with high school students and those in rural areas showing greater improvement. Among tasks, the ‘Living with Questions’ activity, which connects questioning with proactive problem solving, produced the highest improvement. These findings, based on large-scale national data, suggest that explicit questioning education positively affects students’ questioning ability and provide policy implications for developing question-centered curricula and classroom culture.
Ok et al. (Fri,) studied this question.