Using open-ended questions to foster communication

One of the best ways to help your students learn how to communicate and connect information is to ask open-ended questions. Open-ended questions help students connect information because you are asking them to think about what they have learned, and not just answer yes or no.

These questions can be difficult to design because they have to be worded so that your student understands what the goal is. Here, we are going to give you some tips on how to construct open-ended questions that will help your students start connecting the dots.

Number One: Be Specific

When you are specific about the information that you're trying to connect, a student can see what they're being asked to do. 

Being specific also helps your students see what information, handouts, or text they need to review in order to answer the question as accurately as possible.

Number Two: Don't Stick to Basic Questions

Open-ended questions are meant to get ideas connected. This means that you can't have a simple question: they simply don't cut it. Open-ended questions are going to be a little longer, have more details, and indicate what connection needs to be made. That can't be done in a question that only asks what connection there is between Topic One and Topic Two.

Number Three: Have the Question Written Out

One way to help your students with open-ended questions is to make sure that the question is written down somewhere. This can be on a slide, you can write it out on a white board, or you can even post it in the chat. This helps students refer back to the information that they have in their notes, and it also gives them time to process the question. If they can refer to the question this will also help answers stay related to the topic at hand.

Number Four: Don't Ask Too Much

I have talked about open-ended questions generally being longer than others, but there is one thing to watch out for: how much are you asking the students to connect? For your sake and for your students’ sake, be mindful not to write open-ended questions that require students to make connections between 3 or more ideas. Remember, you can always ask your students multiple open-ended questions that connect multiple ideas over the flow of the questions. 

Number Five: Always Know How to Reword Your Questions

Students are not always going to understand the intent of a question right away. They may need additional resources, they may have to refer to notes, or they may just not get it at all. This is why you have to know how to reword your questions.

If you don't know how to reword your questions, then practice writing out different ways to ask the same question. This will help you build the skill needed to reword questions on the fly during a live session.

In Summary

I hope these five tips help you create open-ended questions for your students. These are tips that I've picked up over the years, and I also use them in my own courses. If you have questions that you want us to review, just send us an e-mail and we'll help you right away!

Implementation: Try out some new open-ended questions on your students. Make sure that you follow our tips and don't ask any yes or no questions. Don't forget to tell us how it went!