Questions for girls and questions for boys

Previous research has demonstrated that classroom communication is not equal for boys and girls. Teachers tend to spend more time interacting with boys, and boys are more likely to interrupt classroom discourse to make room for their own contributions. Also, teachers are often more likely to accept boys violating classroom rules than girls. There is a lack of gender equality in the classroom, and one wonders if the fewer numbers of girls going on to study STEM subjects is a consequence of this.

Communication in the classroom is central to the widely recognised education theory of social constructivism, which asserts that students need to participate actively through talking, writing and thinking in order to make sense of new knowledge. Specifically fostering this by open-ended questioning is not a new idea, but there may be subtler reasons why this approach should be adopted.

In a new study by Nina Eliasson and colleagues, emphasis is placed on the communication that occurs during questioning in the classroom: who asks the question; who responds to the question; what type of question is it.

The article includes some ideas for using open-ended questions more effectively in your classroom.