The Question Asking Skills of Preschool Teacher Candidates: Turkey and America Example

Abstract

Question asking is an important skill that teachers should use during class activities. Teachers need to get used to this ability while they are teacher candidates. The aim of this research is to identify the cognitive taxonomy and the structure of the questions asked by the candidate of preschool teachers and to compare the questioning skills of preschool teacher candidates in Michigan, USA and Turkey. The participants were selected from people who are both senior students and have preschool teacher experience. The participant teacher candidates of the present study have stated that they have not taken a questioning skill course, but the topic was taught in some of the courses. In this research, we used document review, a kind of qualitative research technique. Document evaluation was based on question formation forms. The candidate of preschool teachers were asked to write questions on “Question Formation Form”. The questions asked by participant teacher candidates were analyzed and the percent frequency tables of the questions are given. As a result, we observed that teacher candidates have mainly asked questions in the first three levels of the taxonomy. Our results also showed that the teacher candidates from Turkey have rarely asked application questions and candidates from the US have usually asked comprehension questions. When examining structure of the questions, the teacher candidates in Turkey asked more than twice as many close-ended questions than the teacher candidates in the US.