Lecturers' use of questions in undergraduate mathematics lectures

Mathematics lecturers frequently ask questions in their lectures, and these questions presumably play an important role in students’ thinking about and learning of the lecture content. We replicated and developed a coding scheme used in previous research in the US to categorise lecturers’ questions in a sample of 136 lectures given by 24 lecturers at a research-intensive UK university. We found that the coding scheme could be applied reliably, and that factual questions were predominant (as in previous research). We explore differences in the lecturers’ use of questions – both between our UK sample and the previous US work, and between individual lecturers in our sample. We note the presence of strings of related successive questions from the lecturer, which we term ‘question chains’. We explore the nature of these, examine their prevalence, and seek to account for them in terms of the lecturers’ possible intentions. • Mathematics lecturers’ questions were classified reliably from video recordings. • Questions were mostly used to ask for a fact or next step. • Most questions were asked as part of a chain of related questions. • Lecturers varied considerably in their use of questions.