Students’ Behavior of Asking Questions Through Narrative and Informative Texts

Abstract

By asking questions, students can practice many cognitive processes, and these processes may reflect clues about their thinking skills. In order to understand students’ cognitive levels in thinking, questions can be used as agents. Doing so, this study focuses on examining students’ questions in terms of cognitive levels of Bloom’s revised taxonomy, namely, remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. For this purpose, the study followed a qualitative research design with 106 high school students and eight language and literature teachers. To capture the relevant data, students were given two types of texts (narrative and informative), then asked to generate text-based questions as well as their answers. Along with students, teachers were interviewed to find out how they direct students to ask comprehension questions according to instructional strategies they used in asking questions. The data were analyzed through descriptive and content analysis. The results showed that participant students mainly asked questions addressing at the analyze level for the narrative text, and at the understand level for the informative text. These levels are assumed as lower-order thinking skills according to the taxonomy, and possible reasons were discussed with further recommendations.