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According to the Cambridge English Dictionary (2016), a question is a word or words used to find out information. Questioning is an important component of the teaching/learning process and is embedded in quality instruction and strategic thinking. Questions are used to teach as well as to assess student understanding, and thus questioning plays a critical role in the overall success of a classroom. Teachers pose up to 400 questions a day when in the classroom, with 60-80% of the questions requiring recall (Cotton, 1988; Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco, 2010; Saeed et al., 2012). Accordingly, with more than 60,000 questions being asked in one classroom on a yearly basis, approximately 12,000 encourage students to engage in higher order thinking. For questioning to be effective, teachers need to plan for structured, higher level interactions. This article examines the relationship between higher level questioning and the development of critical thinking, which is a higher order thinking skill.

Observe any classroom, and one will most likely see continuous discourse between students and the classroom teacher, with much of the dialogue being composed of questions and answers. Questioning is an essential element of efficacious teaching (Hannel, 2009). Teachers and students will both benefit from questions that are purposefully designed (Peterson & Taylor, 2012) as students will acquire the ability to make connections to prior learning as well as make meaning of the world around them. Through the planning and implementation of questions that require high level thinking, educators foster the kind of engagement and critical thinking skills that students will need to process and address new situations. Higher level questioning requires students to further examine the concept(s) under study through the use of application, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis while lower level questioning simply requires students to gather and recall information. Lower level questions are easier for teachers to produce but do not encourage students to engage in higher level or higher order thinking (Tienken et al., 2010).

Literature Review

Questioning cannot be discussed without referring to the work of Socrates, a Greek philosopher, dating back more than 2000 years. Socrates spent most of his life asking deliberate and organized questions about people's beliefs and values and examining the same. Through questioning, Socrates encouraged his students to explore prior-held beliefs and...

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