Student Generated Questions

This week I would like to share a recent study entitled, “Comparing the effects of generating questions, testing, and restudying on students' long-term recall in university learning.” In this article the authors Ebersbach, Feierabend and Nazari (2020) “compared the long-term effects of generating questions by learners with answering questions and restudying in the context of a university lecture.” The authors found that students' overall recall performance after one week profited from generating questions and testing but not from restudying. The generation of questions benefits long-term retention of coherent learning. The authors conclude that the “finding is important because one central aim of education is to promote the long-term retention of knowledge so that it can be applied in different contexts (information processing model). In addition, long-term retention supports the acquisition of new knowledge by facilitating its assimilation with prior knowledge.” (constructivism)

The study used an experimental pre-/post-design where 105 university psychology students were randomly assigned (77% female; age: M = 21.8 years, SD = 4.5). The assessment instruments were analyzed and produced inter-rater reliabilities ranging between .94 and .98.

The authors also “demonstrated that generating questions has a significant impact on knowledge acquisition even when learners were not prompted or trained in advance on how to generate questions effectively (King, 1992). Thus, the application of this strategy requires little effort and boosts learning.”

You might recall that we shared information in a prior SoTL article about active verb questions through Bloom’s classification. We might consider sharing this with students as we encourage them to create and ask questions using an intentional, scaffolding method.

Reference

Ebersbach, M., Feierabend, M. & Nazari, K. (2020). Comparing the effects of generating questions, testing, and restudying on students' long-term recall in university learning. Appl Cognit Psychol., 34: 724– 736. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3639