The secret roadmap to asking your kids better questions

As a parent, you want to make sure that you're staying involved in your child's education, and that you're encouraging them to think deeply about the content that they're learning. Every parent has had the experience of helping their kids with homework, and wondering if they could be doing more. How great would it be to have a tool that supercharges these conversations with your kids? I want to share an invaluable framework that educators use to stimulate a diverse range of thinking in their students. It's called Bloom's Taxonomy.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a set of categories that divide probing questions into varying degrees of complexity. Asking a range of questions throughout these categories gives you the best idea of whether your child is deeply processing a topic on multiple levels. The categories that Bloom's Taxonomy uses include remembering, comprehending, applying, analyzing, creating and evaluating. They're roughly presented in order of complexity, although there is no clear agreement on hierarchy among analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating. Let's dive into each category!

These questions are all about the facts. They're the low-level who, what, where and when questions you probably hated answering as a kid. They're a bit boring, but the easiest to come up with. Don't write them off though, since remembering questions often serve as a base or prerequisite before learners can grasp more complicated questions. Here are a few examples:

Important question stems: who, what, where, when, list, show, match, select

Comprehending questions ask students to process information instead of just retrieving it. They ask students to connect and organize knowledge by summarizing and interpreting concepts in their own words.  Here are a few examples:

Important question stems: outline, group, categorize, explain, translate, paraphrase

At this level, students need to independently apply prior knowledge.  These questions go beyond checking to see if students remember or understand specific information and check if students can use that information to solve a problem.  Here are a few examples:

Important question stems: build, develop, model, solve, debug, use, determine

Analyzing

Analysis questions require students to break down and reorganize their knowledge to find new relationships between concepts. They'll usually require students to remember and comprehend prior knowledge as part of the process. Here are a few examples:

Important question stems: analyze, divide, dissect, break up, distinguish, compare, contrast

Creating

Creating questions give learners room to be imaginative and inventive. Similar to analysis, synthesis requires learners to deal with component parts. However, instead of breaking up an idea into components, synthesis questions require learners to combine those parts in novel or interesting ways. Here are a few examples:

Important question stems: build, design, combine, propose, improve, modify, imagine, formulate, construct

Evaluating

These questions require students to to make judgements about information and defend their views. Here are a few examples:

Important question stems: defend, evaluate, justify, judge, support, recommend

In case you're feeling overwhelmed, just know that you don't need to ask questions in every single category to push your child's thinking. Just make sure you're picking a variety. If they're having trouble with higher-order questions, start with lower-order questions to build confidence and establish a knowledge foundation. If they seem bored with lower-order questions, try out higher-order Creating or Evaluating questions. 

Hopefully this roadmap gave you some more options for talking to your kids about what they're learning. Even if you're not a subject matter expert in the topic, using the provided question stems to formulate a variety of questions should make for much richer conversations with your kids.