Facilitating Elaborative Learning Through Guided Student-Generated Questioning

A guided learner-generated questioning strategy was designed to prompt learners to elaborate on new material in an effort to facilitate their understanding of that material. In a series of studies conducted in naturalistic settings, the relative effectiveness of this strategy was compared with that of several other learning and study strategies for high school and college students learning regular course content presented in classroom lectures. Findings from these studies indicate that the guided questioning strategy facilitated learning by prompting students to generate specific thought-provoking questions pertaining to the material to be learned, and those questions in turn elicited relevant explanations. The characteristics of the questioning strategy that accounts for these effects were the critical-thinking nature of the question prompts and the high degree of learner autonomy within the structure of the strategy. A model of the components and processes of the strategy is included.