The importance of asking for questions in different ways

“The question is a central aspect of both learning and knowledge creation. Yet students often seem to value more the answer than the question… I think quite the opposite. The quest to answer a question is where the learning takes place, not the answer itself.”—Richard Zare, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, USA.¹

Our students spend a large fraction of their study time preparing to answer questions that appear in examinations. Does this time-consuming exercise lead to a better understanding of science? The simple answer is no! While it is almost obligatory to do well in examinations, it is more important for students to understand the subject well. This does not happen by just learning to answer examination questions. In fact, students should ask more questions than they answer.

The American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi once shared: “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” “That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist”.² Rabi received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). This non-invasive analytical technique has important applications in many fields, including chemistry, biology, and medicine.

The role of the science teacher

The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023 suggests that: “The role of the Teacher in aligning pedagogy and assessment with how students learn Science is critical. Teachers must build an environment that promotes natural curiosity, encourages questions, gives maximum possible opportunities for hands-on activities, and gives ample space to discuss ideas”.⁴ It recommends that teachers use pedagogical processes that simulate “the process of science, such as asking questions” and assess students for their ability to “ask questions” about the phenomena they observe.

I share three strategies that teachers can use at any level of science education. I use them in the course I teach at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, to encourage students to ask questions. They have also allowed me to assess my students’ creative abilities. I do not give routine homework to my students. Instead, every 2-3 weeks, I ask them to submit a single page of writing that includes a science question and its probable answer. Probable, because the answer to the question may not even be known.

My conditions are that the question cannot be from any textbook or examination. Also, ideally, its answer should not be obvious from a reading of their textbook. Over the years, many students have told me that they enjoyed this type of homework, since it made them read and, most importantly, think. From a teacher’s point of view, this approach has an additional advantage. Every student comes up with a different question since this task offers little scope for copying homework from one another.

I have attempted a variation of this in my assessments. In addition to standard questions, I include one with an image relevant to the topics covered in the assessment. The image can be a plot or a photograph. I ask students to share any two science questions one may ask by looking at the image (see Activity Sheet: Asking Scientific Questions and the related Teacher’s Guide).

A third ‘trick’ that I frequently employ is to provide students with a question and its answer. I tell them that the answer may be correct, partially correct, or completely wrong. The student’s task is to ‘evaluate’ the accuracy of the answer and assign marks to it. I also ask them to share reasons to support their evaluation. I assign marks to them by assessing the accuracy of their evaluation and reasoning. My students liked this form of assessment too, since it allowed them to use their judgment in a creative way.