The Use of Open Ended versus Closed Ended Questions in Turkish Classrooms

Asking students good questions is a critical tool for developing their skills. In particular, open ended questions are believed to be useful for developing students’ cognitive skills, as these questions encourage them to express and elaborate upon their thinking, and provide rationales for their thoughts (Lee, Kinzie, & Whittaker, 2012). Open ended questions are likely to engage children in higher-order thinking (Roth, 1996) and usually involve reasoning and judgment (Hargreaves, 1984). Within this context, this study is an attempt to explore how a training program on open ended questions encourages teachers to improve their classroom practices. In particular, this cross-sectional study focuses on Turkish teachers’ questioning strategies, and aims to explore how Turkish teachers benefit from open ended questions in their classes, depending on their experience, gender and the grade of their classes, and to what extent their use of open ended questions differentiate after a training program. At the start of the study, teachers who were teaching Turkish to different grades at different schools were video-recorded in their classes with their students. After the recordings, a teacher training program on the roles and types of question was given to teachers in order to develop their awareness about open ended questions that they use in their classrooms. Following the training, teachers were recorded in their classes in the same way again. Finally, after the discourse transcription, the teachers’ questions were classified as open or closed ended, and a comparison of the data recorded before and after the training was designed to determine whether the training course had positive effects on teachers’ use of open ended questions. The results of this study indicate that the training encouraged teachers to adopt a more systematic and reflective pedagogical practice. After training, the teachers asked more open ended questions which resulted in more student participation, thus there was more dialogue in the classrooms.