Does Answering Higher-Level Questions While Reading Facilitate Productive Learning?

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the effects of asking students questions at different levels of cognitive complexity during learning. The first section reviewed research on levels of questions. It was shown that higher level questions can have facilitative effects on both reproductive and productive knowledge, but that the conditions under which such facilitation occurs are not well understood. The second section outlines an information processing model of human cognition that can account for question level effects and that serves to integrate previous research on question level and to provide direction for future research in this area.