Perspective-Based Generic Questions as a Tool to Promote Student Biology Teacher Questioning

In biological research, generic questions that are derived from perspectives (ways of looking at and thinking about life processes) help in generating specific questions. In this study, we used perspective-based generic questions as scaffolds to support student teachers in increasing the quality and quantity of their questions about biological topics. Fifteen student biology teachers were given an intervention to individually generate, in 15 min, as many questions as possible that they might ask in class about standards from the national syllabus for biology on a particular biological topic, first without using, and then using a set of perspective-based generic questions. The results of this study show that, using perspective-based generic questions, student teachers generated significantly more and higher quality questions. The formulated questions can be applied in two different contexts: during practicum, when student teachers actually teach biology, or when they plan future lessons, as the basis of challenging tasks or assignments, with the aim of getting students interested in finding the answers.