Children’s Question Asking in Early Childhood Education: Supportive Strategies and Motivational Contexts

While improving teachers’ questioning skills and techniques should be the primary focus in professional development, it is equally crucial for teachers to help children recognize that some questions are more effective for learning than others and that asking with a purpose leads to a deeper understanding. Well-formulated questions and the ability to discern which questions are worth posing are also essential components of developing into an autonomous learner and decision-maker. The collaborative case study presented here, conducted by a university researcher and an early childhood teacher, responded to calls for research into children’s questions across diverse cultural contexts and with a variety of methodologies. Through qualitative data collection and analysis over a five-month period, the study had the advantage of tracking the learning journey of a group of 4- and 5-year-olds in a Greek early childhood setting, from repeating each other’s questions to asking purposeful questions in various contexts and documenting how children’s questioning skills were co-constructed in context. Through examples of critical incidents and samples of children’s efforts, the paper discusses the strategies that supported children in posing more effective questions and illustrates how the surrounding conversational and social environment can facilitate the improvement of question-asking.