Abstract

Teacher education programs adopted alternative practicum field experiences for preservice teachers (PSTs) during the COVID-19 pandemic when school placements were not available. One approach was for PSTs to teach each other, video-record their teaching, and code types of questions asked by the teachers. For a mathematics practicum, PSTs coded questions in two broad categories with four question types: lower-order questions that elicited (a) yes/no response or (b) one-word/short-answer responses; and higher-order questions that prompted students to (c) explain a mathematical concept or their chosen strategy and (d) give reasons for their strategy choice. This mixed-methods study examined data from PSTs’ coding of their peers’ questions posed during fourth-grade mathematics lessons, comparing it with the teacher educator’s coding of the same questions. In addition, PSTs’ lesson reflections served as a data source for triangulation as well as a means to analyze PSTs’ learning from this task. The results indicated that PSTs coded questions more often as higher order than the teacher educator. The findings also revealed the PSTs’ tendency to ask lower-order questions to gather recall or procedural information from students more than higher-order questions that probed students for an explanation or justification of their chosen strategies to solve a problem. Furthermore, the PSTs’ reflections on the coding task showed that PSTs were not only surprised that so many posed questions were lower-order, but also felt that coding questions increased their awareness of question quality. Recommendations suggest approaches that can be incorporated into teacher education programs to develop PSTs’ questioning skills.