Guide to creating good questions
Filamentality encourages the use of good questions. Good questions challenge students to use information meaningfully - - to think, to analyze, to evaluate, to invent. A simple question like "When did Columbus come to America?" evokes a simple answer. Open-ended questions encourage description or explanation. An open-ended question such as "Why did Columbus embark on the trip that eventually led him to America?" is much different. Both simple and open-ended questions can be used to engage students in uncovering the important ideas at the heart of a topic of study.

The use of questions has been studied by many and a multitude of question types has emerged. Among the most basic are "foundation questions ." Foundation questions ask "who, what, when, where, how." They build the foundation of students' factual knowledge on a topic. The Treasure Hunt format is designed to support learning facts and is the format most likely to use foundation questions.

Concept to Classroom, an online series of FREE professional development workshops, list four major types of questions in their inquiry-based learning workshop: inference questions, interpretation questions, transfer questions, and hypotheses questions.

• Inference questions: asks students to arrive at some kind of conclusion based on reasoning and facts and possible missing information
  
  
• Interpretation questions: proposes students explain or demonstrate meaning in light of their individual beliefs, judgment, or circumstances
  
  
• Transfer questions: encourages students to use existing knowledge and apply it toward a different topic
  
  
• Hypotheses questions: ask students to test the validity of information and predict outcomes

We encourage you to use these kinds of questions in Samplers and WebQuests; although you can mix them up in any format! The ultimate goal is to promote student observation, reasoning, critical thinking, and the ability to justify or re-examine their existing knowledge which in turn brings students to better understand and motivate the learning process.

Check out the Dimension of Learning website for ideas. They identify five dimensions of learning. Three of them can be incorporated into your questions: 1) Attitudes and Perceptions; 2) Acquire and Integrate Knowledge; and 3) Extend and Refine Knowledge (classifying, abstracting, inductive/deductive reasoning, analyzing). The fourth dimension, Use Knowledge Meaningfully, can structure the assignment or activity associated with the Filamentality pages you create by incorporating these kinds of activities:

Simple Question Matrix

Want to know more about questioning?

• Try the Questioning Toolkit from the Educational Technology Journal, From Now On.org.
• Or how about trying a "subject sampler" on creating essential questions called Plugging Into the Web?
• Inquiry-based Learning workshop from thirteen ed online.
• The Inquiry Page from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign supports a dynamic community and includes a searchable database of inquiry-based lessons
• An introduction to inquiry-based learning from The YouthLearn Initiative, Education Development Center, Inc.
• Question Matrix from the Department of Education Tasmania
• Create a simple concept map using Teach-nology's Concept Web Generator
• Asking Better Questions and Elaborating Information for Better Remembering are from About Memory.
• WebQuest Taskonomy provides examples of desired results, what better place to start your questions?