Categories of Questions and Critical Thinking

Asking questions is an important teaching tool as this helps educators assess student learning and stimulate students to think. Alongside this notion, this study was made to determine the categories of questions and critical thinking skills of the Grade 10 students from Xavier University Junior High School. It sought to find out the categories of questions based on Anderson and Krathwohl’s Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. This is followed by finding out the students’ Student Talk and Critical Thinking Skills under Induction, Credibility, Deduction and Assumption identification. The relationship between teachers’ categories of questions during classroom discussion and students’ critical thinking was investigated and discussed. Teachers were also interviewed for this purpose. The results showed that the categories of questions based on Anderson and Krathwohl’s Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, were usually at the lower categories, namely: Remembering and Understanding. While the students’ over-all critical thinking skills fell under Average. The skills under Induction were scored at Average while the skills under Credibility, Deduction and Assumption identification were scored at Fair. Most of Student Talk fell under Brief Response, Silence and Covert or Mumbled Responses. Most of the Student Initiates consisted of only Covert or Mumbled Initiates. It can be surmised that there is a significant relationship between category of questions during classroom discussion and students’ critical thinking. Once the lower categories have been satisfied; the higher the categories of questions, the more likely higher the students’ critical thinking is. Further, the interview with teachers yielded the following: students have opportunities to demonstrate HOTS through prepared questions in the lesson guides and pre-assigned selections; some evidences of thinking critically include outputs, test results or performance; difficulties include students’ discomfort with wait time, settling with one-word answers and the lack of motivation to read or answer and to solve the problems, teachers maintain motivation and have students read ahead; and lastly, to help develop more meaningful questions, use good materials that initiate discussion, set expectations, re-define and review lesson plans, and continue subject integration. Among the recommendations are for students to maximize their activities and to participate in the discussion; for teachers to give ample wait time and to continue to plan and design lessons which contain questions targeting the students’ HOTS; the English Department to continue inclusion of planning of questions and sharing of best practices in meetings; the administrators to include more effective integration sessions, to organize seminar-workshops, refreshers and teacher trainings and lastly, the future researchers to look into other factors and other taxonomies and apply these in different subject areas.