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Questioning the Relationships

Exploring Analogous and Homologous Structures Through Teacher Questioning

Science Scope—Fall 2023 (Volume 46, Issue 7)

By Jesse Wilcox, Kean Roberts, Jacob Kaemmer, Jessica McKenzie, and Carson McClain

Questioning the Relationships

Questions are powerful tools teachers can use to understand and scaffold students’ thinking (Clough 2007). However, not all questions are equally effective at eliciting students’ ideas or scaffolding their thinking. For example, open-ended questions tend to elicit more detailed responses from students when compared to closed questions (Oliveira 2010; Voss, Kruse, and Kent-Schneider 2022). While asking open-ended questions is a good starting place, scaffolding students’ thinking requires teachers to use different types of open-ended questions (Clough 2007). Therefore, we utilize questioning strategies such as Speculation, History, Application, Relationships, and Explanation (SHARE) to engage students in productive discussions and gently guide students’ thinking toward accurate scientific ideas as shown in Figure 1 by Wilcox et al. (2021a), which was adapted from Penick, Crow, and Bonnstetter (1996). SHARE was specifically developed for science teaching and uses students’ prior knowledge and speculations to help students to apply their knowledge, develop relationships, and create explanations (Clough 2007).

Evolution Life Science NGSS Middle School

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