Wait Time as a Questioning Skill

October 21, 2016 - (PDF)

This week’s Toolbox email follows up on a comment made on the last thread by David Peterson, who likened effective multiple-choice questions to those that also work well for spurring discussion in class. Along these lines, Karron Lewis, who works with UT-Austin’s Faculty Innovation Center, has prepared a helpful guide for “Developing Questioning Skills” (attached). It includes:

• General guidelines for question-asking
• An overview of specific levels of questions
• A discussion of the benefits of “wait time” (see below)
• Suggestions for how to critique one’s own questioning techniques
• A list of related references

Decades ago, science education innovator Mary Budd Rowe extensively studied the simple concept of “wait time.” Wait time is the amount of time between when an instructor asks a question and when the instructor calls upon a student to answer that question (or answers the question herself). As reported by Lewis, Rowe found that the average wait time was a mere 1.5 seconds. Yet, when instructors extended their wait time to 5 seconds or more, Rowe discovered that:

• The length of students’ responses increased
• Students were more likely to articulate themselves in whole sentences
• Speculative thinking appeared
• Students used arguments based on evidence
• Students shifted away from teacher-centered, show-and-tell kinds of responses to more student-student interaction
• The number of questions students asked increased
• Instructors bought themselves time to listen and think
• Teachers began to show more variability in the kinds of questions they ask