Assessment Strategies and Tools: Question and Answer

Questioning serves as assessment when it is related to outcomes. Teachers use questioning (usually oral) to discover what students know and can do. Strategies for effective question and answer assessment include:

• Apply a wait time or 'no hands-up rule' to provide students with time to think after a question before they are called upon randomly to respond.
• Ask a variety of questions, including open-ended questions and those that require more than a right or wrong answer.
• Use Bloom's Taxonomy when developing questions to promote higher-order thinking.

Teachers can record the results of question and answers in anecdotal notes or include them as part of their planning to improve student learning.