Question design (Houen et al, 2016)

Houen, S., Danby, S., Farrell, & Thorpe, K. (2016) ‘I wonder what you know…’ teachers designing requests for factual information. Teaching and Teacher Education, 59, 68-78.

In this paper, Sandy Houen and her colleagues provide a neat summary of the policy and practice imperatives of high quality interactions in early learning, before showing how this can be achieved in her own data of a teacher requesting factual information – then responding – with two children aged 3-4 years.  The analysis shoes that question design, rather than lack of knowledge, may define problematic requests. ‘”I wonder … “ requests worked to free the child to contribute to the conversation the

knowledge held without teacher evaluation. The “I wonder …” request was more successful than the explicit ‘wh’ question design in gaining a response.’ (p.75)