Teacher questions in secondary biology classrooms: making scientific practices meaningful for students

The purpose of this study is to explore how teachers use questions in secondary biology classrooms to engage students in scientific practices and how students perceive these questions. The focus is on teaching rather than learning outcomes. Six teachers from four schools in Xi’an City took part. A standard data collection sequence of three lessons and three interviews was conducted for each teacher. Eight students aged 12 to 16 were selected from these classes and interviewed one-to-one. The study found the following. First, polished lessons that referred to the teacher developing and repeatedly refining a lesson based on colleagues’ suggestions after live classroom observation enabled more open questions. Second, teacher questions were affected by personal (e.g., teacher knowledge), internal (to the school), and external (e.g., national curriculum policy) factors with external policy shift significantly affecting questioning practices. These factors aligned to support implementation of scientific practices or teachers working actively to negotiate tensions. Third, students demonstrated sophisticated and thoughtful reflections on, for instance, open and closed questions and scenario-based questions that asked them to think from the perspective of a scientist. This expands our knowledge of students’ views about teacher questions. The method of using episodes when interviewing teachers and students about teacher questions gave new insights into how teachers selected and adapted drawings, gestures, teaching materials and resources to support their questioning and scientific practices and the relationship between what students said and what their teachers said about teacher questions. The findings have important implications for policy and practice; for example, teacher trainers need to recognize the complexity of teacher questioning and how this is affected by multiple factors so that resources can be developed to help teachers negotiate these tensions.