From Larry Cuban

Exactly how many questions do teachers ask? A two-decade-old research article summarized research on teacher questioning.

Research has shown that teachers ask a high frequency of questions. In 1960, Floyd (1960) developed a study with 40 elementary teachers and found that these teachers asked 93 percent of all classroom questions. Also during the 60s, Schreiber (1967) found that fifth-grade teachers asked about 64 questions each during 30-minute social studies lessons. Later, Levin and Long (1981) reviewed effective teaching research and concluded that teachers asked 300-400 questions per day. Cotton (1988) suggested that teachers spend half of the class time asking questions. These numbers confirm the results obtained by Stevens in her precursor study about classroom questioning conducted in 1912. This author also found that teachers dominated the verbal interaction in class, asking an average of 400 questions daily. Stevens (1912) concluded that 80% of the class time was spent with the teacher‟s questions and the students‟ answers. In 1994, Graesser and Person (1994) found that the teacher‟s questions corresponded to 96% of all questions raised in class. These authors also concluded that a teacher asks, on average, 69 questions per hour, which corresponds to 30000 questions per year! In 2002, Kerry reinforced these numbers, noting that if teachers ask an average of 43.6 questions per hour, they are likely to ask about 2 million questions in an average career.

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