There Is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question

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By MAUREEN DONOHUE-SMITH

Always trying to get my students to participate in class, I find myself regularly exhorting them: "Please feel free to ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question." Yet even as I speak, I know I am not being completely honest. In fact, the students and I are all painfully aware that, like beauty, the stupidity of a question is in the eye of the beholder.

Questions aren't asked in a vacuum; their intelligence or stupidity depends on a variety of contextual variables. The ideal question is the right one, posed to the right source in the right way at the right time for the right reasons. My students know as well as I do that the questions we ask speak volumes about us — and that what they say isn't always complimentary.

Cut to the faculty lounge, where a professor is venting her exasperation: "Can you believe he interrupted our discussion of Hegel to ask how long the paper should be? I went over that threetimes in class, and it's right there on the syllabus!" Her colleagues nod and agree that they never would have asked their professors such an ill-timed question.

Then eavesdrop on an introductory psychology course, in which a student waves wildly to attract the teacher's attention. It's only two weeks into the term, but already he is notorious for asking at least 10 questions per class, few of which rise above the level of "How do you spell that?" This time he begins with the classic defensive maneuver, "I know this is a stupid question, but ..."

The nonverbal reactions of his classmates are unmistakable: Some students sigh, while others compress their lips in irritation. Not wanting to stifle student participation, the teacher patiently responds, but the thread of the discussion unravels, and class momentum slows.

To paraphrase a common axiom: Answer a student's question, and you have educated her for a day; teach a student how to question, and you have educated her for a lifetime.

Saying that there are no stupid questions devalues the process of inquiry. Questions are the engines that power the growth of knowledge, and we cannot rely solely on a random interrogatory process. Although unstructured strategies such as brainstorming and free association have their uses, we need to balance them with a disciplined approach to questioning. Students must learn to expand on initial answers as they ask new questions.

Professors can help students make their questions more intelligent.

• Demonstrate how to organize information. Think out loud to show how you organize complex material, and focus on the most important elements. Shift paradigms, discussing a topic from different perspectives. Challenge underlying assumptions.

• Require students to ask questions in class. Research on students' attention spans suggests pausing every 15 or 20 minutes to allow students to organize their notes and summarize important points. During those pauses, ask groups of three or four students to think of several significant questions about what they're learning. Have them share the questions with the rest of the class, ask why they consider them important, and ask other students to modify the questions.

• Encourage students to answer their own questions. It is usually easier to ask the professor for information, but students become more effective learners if they have multiple strategies for finding information. Referring them to the library for some answers is a good way to expand their research strategies beyond Google. Setting up an online chat room for the course allows students to ask each other questions, and monitoring that discussion allows you to assess the quality of the questions and answers and bring up in a future class any issues that remain unresolved.

• Teach students about the different types of questions.In the 1950s, Benjamin S. Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, developed a taxonomy of educational objectives. Professors can use his system, which arranges cognitive behaviors along a continuum from simple to complex, to guide students' choices of the appropriate level of question.

  To begin with, professors should consider how much students know. For instance, do they need basic facts? Can they demonstrate understanding by paraphrasing, explaining, or giving examples? Can they extract principles and apply them to other problems? Can they analyze arguments and identify underlying assumptions?

  In using Bloom's model, however, a caveat is in order. Bloom and other scholars did not consider one category of question superior to another, but people often assume that more-complex, "higher order" questions are intrinsically better than simple fact-seeking ones. We should avoid such a hierarchical interpretation of the categories, thinking instead of them as arranged in a feedback loop. The answers to higher-order questions either support or challenge the questioner's data and thus cycle back to a potential reconfiguration of prior knowledge. Students may question facts, rethink interpretations, or challenge generalizations at any point.

• Help your students understand questions' subtexts. Sometimes people ask questions without really wanting to acquire information. Think of the question-and-answer period following a presentation at a professional conference: Some members of the audience ask questions to offer support to the speaker; others ask them to attack, embarrass, or discredit him; still others ask them to demonstrate their own superior knowledge.

  A student may also have motives for a question beyond the simple pursuit of knowledge. But whether or not students' questions affect how the professor or their peers view them, once students move to the workplace, they are likely to be judged by what they ask.

  We must help them recognize how a question's content and timing can send a message about the questioner, whether intended or not. For instance, when a student asks about due dates or how long the research paper should be, she is saying that she hasn't read the syllabus.

As faculty members, we certainly do not want to constrain students' curiosity; we want to create environments where they can experiment with new perspectives, where they feel free to ask broad, even playful, questions. However, to stop there is to fall short of our responsibility as educators. If we say that all questions are created equal and that there is no such thing as a stupid question, we are not teaching students to think critically.

Students must learn to handle requests for information with care. After all, some questions may be loaded.

Maureen Donohue-Smith is an assistant professor of human services at Elmira College.