A key skill that children should learn is to ask questions. Yet question asking is seldom taught. The focus is on making sure that children give the answer, the correct answer, to questions. Yet, it is the question that sparks curiosity and provides inspiration to dive into the information gap. But what is a good question?
At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Daniels Bartels are working on ways to develop learning-to-learn capacity:
“We found that when we taught participants looking at one exhibit to ask ‘What if . . . ?’ and ‘How can . . . ?’ questions that nobody present would know the answer to and that would spark exploration, they engaged in better inquiry at the next exhibit—asking more questions, performing more experiments and making better interpretations of their results.
Juicy questions that contained both the cause and the effect spark the interest and lead to a deeper engagement into the science content in the exhibits.
The question:
“What if we pull this one magnet out and see if the other ones move by the same amount?”
was more interesting than
“What happens if we pull out this magnet?”
Click here to explore the great Exploratorium website. There are a number of blog posts about children and question asking, go here.
Photo “Mom With Child In Beach” by David Castillo Dominici