The impact of Teachers' assessment of their questioning technique on students' higher order thinking skills

النوع : Mémoire

In this study, the researcher tackles three major issues in education: teachers’ self-assessment, questioning technique and students' higher order thinking skills. She also relates teachers' self-assessment to their professional development. Accordingly, she presents ways, tools and instruments for teachers to evaluate themselves through conducting an action research. This research, qualitative in approach, takes place in a first-grade classroom where the teacher is also the researcher. Throughout the study, extending over a period of one academic year, the teacher/researcher evaluates her teaching strategies and techniques aiming to improve them and improve her performance in general, and her questioning technique in particular. The questioning technique has proven to be ineffectively used by teachers as both the literature and the researcher's preliminary research indicate. And because she believes in its great significance, she attempted to implement it effectively in her classroom in order to find out whether it has a positive impact on students' thinking skills. As a result, she found out that applying effective questioning technique helps improve students' thinking skills both on the normal and the higher levels of thinking. The research findings also indicate that when teachers evaluate themselves regularly, they would grow professionally, improve their questioning technique and, therefore, help develop their students' normal and high-level thinking skills.