Students often focus on “what” they need to learn, but one of the most important things they can learn in your classroom is critical thinking skills. Using effective questioning can help foster critical thinking and deeper learning.
Let’s take a look at different kinds of critical thinking questions and how to use them with students.
Examples of higher order thinking questions
Closed-ended questions have a limited set of answers, while open-ended questions have more thoughtful or expansive answers. Both have a place in the classroom — and even critical thinking.
According to Bloom’s taxonomy, students expand knowledge in progression from simplest skills to those that build on earlier skills.
- Remember
- Understand
- Apply
- Analyze
- Evaluate
- Create
Close-ended questions are good for checking what students remember and understand, but it doesn’t end there. Close-ended questions can help students gather more information that may lead to additional questioning.
Critical thinking questions can engage students in a variety of upper level thinking skills. For example:
- Analyze
—Breakdown the process into the essential steps.
—Analyze the theme of loneliness in the poem. - Evaluate
—How effective is the argument for starting school earlier in the day?
—What are the pros and cons of building a bike path in town? - Create
—What would happen if the internet stopped working?
—How would you design a program to help kids with homework?
We made it easy for you to bring more open-ended critical thinking questions to your classroom with Elevate Thinking: 60 Critical Question Stems for Deeper Learning.
Stems cover:
- Analyzing
- Evaluating
- Creating
- Comparing and Contrasting
- Predicting and Hypothesizing
- Clarifying and Elaborating
Get your copy to start elevating thinking today.
Using more critical thinking questions
When you use critical thinking questions with your class, you’ll encourage students to reflect more and come to a deeper understanding of the material and their own thought processes. You’ll also be modeling the art of questioning for students.
Questions to examine thought process include:
- Can you explain how you got that answer?
- What evidence did you use to conclude that?
- Where could you look for more information about this?
- How would you approach this problem?
Students can journal on these questions or have facilitated conversations.
To help students develop their own questions for inquiry-based learning, encourage them to ask a variety of questions. For starters, have them ask who, what, when, why, and how questions.
Point out that sometimes a line of inquiry brings up new information that can lead to a new set of questions.
They can also consider questions like:
- What if …
- What don’t we know?
- What are other perspectives on this topic? Which voices aren’t being heard?
- What are other/similar examples?
Or give them some higher-level thinking stems and have them use them to create their own questions.
Elevate Thinking: 60 Critical Question Stems for Deeper Learning.
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