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Using Student-Generated Questions to Promote Deeper Thinking

Please read this fascinating article posted on Edutopia; Understanding how people learn and reliably commit things to memory is what prompted psychology professor Mirjam Ebersbach and her colleagues at the University of Kassel to study how students prepare for an exam, and what strategies yielded the optimal improvements in student learning. Learn how asking students to create their own questions has a powerful impact on learning. “Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content,” Ebersbach told Edutopia. “One has to reflect what one has learned and how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge.” Plus, 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions and ideas to incorporate student-generated questions into your classroom. I especially love the idea of playing Jeopardy with students! To create the game, specialized software isn’t even necessary: The researchers in the study used the wiki feature in the class’s learning management system to create a 6x5 table with each cell containing a question. Similarly, you can use PowerPoint or Google Slides to create the Jeopardy! game grid. Having good questions helps inquiry into data; the questions always come first and are vital for insights. That’s why at LAC we always strongly recommend following the road map to building data culture you can see below.

The very first step is to determine what you value most about your learners and formulate the questions you want to pursue, even before you start identifying what data you have or may need. 




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