The Relationship between Format and Cognitive Depth of Science Teacher-Generated Questions

Asking questions is an important component of promoting inquiry and argumentation in the science classroom. We investigated the relationship between the cognitive depth and format of teacher-generated questions to be used with classroom response technologies. Twelve middle school science teachers were randomly assigned to write constrained or free-response questions on four different topics and to rate the cognitive depth of those questions. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to guide question classification, we found that the teacher-generated free-response questions were 5.58 times more likely to be at the understanding level than the remembering level and 2.05 time more likely to be at the applying level than the understanding level. Our findings provide evidence of a potential barrier to adopting inquiry-based science teaching practices.