Good questions to ask

My last blog talked about the idea of situation questions. These are questions that cause the subjects to imagine themselves in a certain situation and to explain how they would react. This got me thinking about what kind of situations I would want to present to the students. I’m sure that when I am in the field my questions might change a little, but I can at least have a foundation of situations to build off of.  I also wonder if I should phrase the questions in third-person or first person? Reactivity may be affected if students pretend to give advice from third-person perspective, for example: “If a student arrives late, what would you expect …” or his/her personal perspective, “you arrive late to class, what…”

The following will be a list of topics and questions that could be interesting to investigate for my research.

Retake a test

‘You receive a very low score on a test that you feel does not reflect your knowledge of the subject, how would you react?’

“If you confronted the teacher about it, do you think he/she would provide an opportunity for you to raise your test grade?’

Parent-teacher relationships

              A parent discovers that his/her son/daughter is failing a class, how would she react?

A teacher realizes that one of his/her students never turns in his/her homework, should the teacher contact his parents? What would you recommend to that the students does his homework?

Would you recommend that your parents speak with your teachers on a regular basis? Why/why not?

Teacher –student relationships

A science teacher explains a difficult concept in class and when the school bell rings to indicate classes are over, he/she warns all the students that the following day there will be a quiz on that same subject.  You feel like you didn’t quite understand the concept is not ready for the quiz tomorrow.  What would you do?

After graduation you and your family host a casual party with food and music. You feel an appreciation for a few of your teachers, would you invite them?

Late policy

Friday during school your teacher assigns the class a reading and to write a summary of the article, you arrive Monday at class and realized you forgot to do the assignment, what do you do?

A student turns in an assignment a week late, what reaction would you expect from the teacher?

Absence

A student is absent from school three days in a row with no indication of parental consent, what would you expect from the teacher?

This list also causes me to think about other questions I could ask. I could try gran tour questions such as: If I was a transfer student from the United States, and I asked you to explain to me … what would you tell me? And add in questions like:

What to expect during one day at school what would you say to me, what?

What help should I expect from the teacher?

I could even ask: If you were to travel to a school in American, can you describe to me what you would expect throughout the course of one day? This type of question would really help me understand what the common ideology is about American schools.

I’m sure I could explore much more in depth possible questions to contribute to my research but I know more ideas will come as I continue to visit local classrooms.  To close I must say, just thinking up the questions above got me really excited about the interesting information I will be able to find while doing this project.