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An Analysis on The Cognitive Level of Teachers’ Questions of The Eighth Grade Students of SMP Negeri 10 Kendari (A Descriptive Study In EFL Classroom) Novita Rahayu Halu Oleo University Drs. Alimin, M.Hum. (Supervisor) Halu Oleo University La Ode Nggawu, S.Pd., M.Si. (Co. Supervisor) Halu Oleo University

English Education Department Teacher Training and Education Faculty Halu Oleo University Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT This research was accomplished to investigate (1) the cognitive level of teachers’ questions at eighth grade in SMPN 10 Kendari, (2) the distribution of teachers’ questions on lower and higher cognitive level, (3) teachers’ opinions about the questioning and the used of cognitive level on questions. The researcher used the qualitative data which is descriptive study. The data source were collected from the teaching process by two English teachers who teach at Eighth grade in SMP Negeri 10 Kendari. The researchers conducted six observation to collect the data. The key instruments used in this researcher was classroom observation and interview. The researcher collected the data a qualitative observational method by using an observational guide and audio recording were conducted. The questions were collected, listed, and analyzed according to Bloom's Taxonomy: low order thinking

skills: knowledge, comprehension, and application, and high order thinking skills: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The researcher focused only the asked questions of the teachers. The findings showed that; firstly, among 106 questions there are 15.1% is knowledge level (C1), 59.4% is comprehension (C2), 4.7% is application (C3), 12.3% is analysis (C4), however synthesis level (C5) were not observed, and 8.5% is evaluation (C6). The results indicate that the knowledge and comprehension questions were frequently asked by the teacher respectively while it leaves little opportunity for synthesis and evaluation level. Secondly, the results showed the teacher asked more lower-cognitive questions is 79.2% than higher one is 20.8%. Thirdly, teachers thought that questions is important activity to be done during the teaching process and the used of cognitive level of questions should be classified based on students grade class. This study can be useful for teachers to be aware of various cognitive levels of questions and apply in the classroom in order to help students to optimize their learning. Key words: questioning, cognitive level of question, Bloom’s taxonomy.

1. Introduction As the education had already entered personal digitization information age, where many changes in classroom teaching and in the students’ activities. Classroom activity especially in teaching has become more scientific, interesting and vivid. It demands teacher to use the best teaching technique and strategies to make a good teaching. There are many teaching techniques that the teacher can apply in the class to involve the students in learning. One of the teaching techniques that we really need to pay attention is the practice of questioning as it helps teachers to gain students’ responses and stimulate their thinking skill. Question is very beneficial to help students learn necessary information or material as Weimer (2011) states that questioning can provide feedback. When teacher ask questions, the students will think and are demanded to respond. When students try to respond, teachers can see

how far the students understand the lesson and teacher can correct or help the students to correct their mistakes or something they have not really understood. So that, questioning can help teacher to oversee students’ understanding and increasing students’ cognitive developments in classroom interaction. In other that, many researchers showed that teachers faced difficulty in asking questions in an EFL classroom. The problem is teachers cannot vary the cognitive level of classroom question that can stimulate students to actively construct knowledge. Most of questions that teachers ask to the students sometimes are not suitable with the students’ cognitive level. The analyses of classroom questions utilized by teachers indicate that memory and comprehension, two low-level mental operation, most commonly are emphasized in classroom discourse, often to the exclusion of higher order operations. Most questions in textbooks and other instructional materials are at the lower cognitive levels. However, teachers are frequently unaware of how heavily they rely on questioning. In one study, elementary teachers who thought they were asking 12 to 20 questions each half hour actually asked 45 to 150 questions (e.g., Khan and Inamullah, 2011; Shen, 2012). As the researcher found at eighth grade in SMP Negeri10 Kendari the used of cognitive level on teachers question were quite less. This phenomenon motivated the researcher to conduct a descriptive study to observe the cognitive level of teachers’ question at eighth grade in SMP Negeri 10 Kendari. I chose the school because during my teaching practicum in this school, I had observed the English teachers’ teaching and I saw that the teachers did not really optimize the practice of questioning especially the use of cognitive level based on Bloom’s taxonomy. By understanding the cognitive levels of questions used by the teachers, this study can be beneficial for teachers as reference to make them aware of various cognitive levels of question and apply it in teaching-learning process in order to give positive impact on students learning. The purpose of this study is to describe what types of cognitive level of questions used by the teachers in the learning and teaching process. The researcher also investigated the distribution of the teachers’ questions on

higher and lower cognitive level. In order that, to investigate the teachers’ opinions about the questioning and the cognitive level of question in the learning process.

2. Literature Review 

Teacher Questioning in Teaching Questioning is one of basic teaching skill that teacher should have. Socrates

believed that knowledge and awareness are an intrinsic part of each learner. Thus, in exercising the craft of good teaching an educator must reach into the learner's hidden levels of knowing and awareness in order to help the learner reach new levels of thinking. It can be said that questioning is the heart of teaching learning process. Through the art of questioning the teacher can exploit the hidden potentialities of students, however this mainly depends upon the types of questions teachers ask. 

The Components of Questioning According to Brown (1975, p. 104), there are at least four out of eight

components in questioning techniques which should be mastered by teachers:



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Clarity and Coherence

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Pausing and Pacing

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Directing and Distributing

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Prompting and Probing

The Role and Function of Question in Teaching Questions in the class serve as different functions. According to Kanchak and

Eggen (1989) the functions can be basically grouped into three categories: diagnostic, instructional and motivational, but a single question can usually serve more than one function. As a diagnostic tool, classroom questions allow the teacher to glimpse into the minds of students to find out not only what they know or don’t know but also how they think about a topic. The instructional function means that questions can be used as a technique to facilitate learners to learn the new knowledge in the learning

process. As to motivational function, skillful use of questions can effectively involve students in the classroom discourse, encouraging and challenging them to think. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy for the Cognitive Domain To aid the use of questioning strategies there are question classification

systems. The most popular system for classifying questions is Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl's (1956) taxonomy, known as Bloom's Taxonomy. This taxonomy has proven to be a valuable tool in designing, conducting, and evaluating classroom instruction. As one of the earliest taxonomies, Bloom (1956, cited in Brown, 2007, p. 172) categorizes questions into the following groups: 1. Knowledge: the recalling of formerly-learned material (e.g. What is the special name of this triangle?) 2. Comprehension: the ability to understand the meaning (e.g. Explain how you got that answer). 3. Application: the ability to use learned material such as rules, methods, concepts, principles, laws and theories in new and concrete situations (e.g. Give me an example of a situation that you may have this experience.) 4. Analysis: the ability to breakdown material into its elements so that its organizational structure may be understood. (e.g. Why did that work in this case?) 5. Synthesis: the ability to collect different parts and put them together to create a new whole. (e.g. What would happen if you called him?) 6.

Evaluation: the ability to assess the value of materials, the explanation to problems or the details about particular cultures (What do you think?).



Cognitive Level of Question Bloom‟s Taxonomy (1956) consists of a six-level classification scale:

knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. In order that, Cotton (2013) also groups types of question into two: lower and higher cognitive questions. As addition, Brown (1975, p. 103) defines lower order question are

questions which are used to create correct single answers and higher order questions are questions which used to create new knowledge in the learner. In my study I will use Bloom’s taxonomy questioning categorizes and to determine the cognitive level into lower-higher questions by using Brown’s types of questions level. Categories of teacher questions are as follows: 

Lower cognitive level of questions -

Recall/Knowledge: Does the pupil recall what he has seen or read?

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Comprehension: Does the pupil understand what he recalls?

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Application: Can the pupil apply rules and techniques to solve problems that have a single correct answer?



Higher cognitive level of questions: -

Analysis: Can the pupil identify motives and causes, and make inferences and give examples to support his statement?

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Synthesis: Can the pupil make predictions, solve problems or produce interesting position of ideas and images?

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Evaluation: Can the pupil judge the quality of ideas, or problem solutions, or works of art? Can he give rationally based opinions on issues or controversies? (Brown, 1975).

The classification of teachers’ cognitive level of questions can help teacher to evaluate their teaching strategy in learning process. Besides that teacher can optimize the using of various questioning cognitive level to improve students critical thinking and promote students linguistics ability.

3. Research Methodology In this study, the researcher used qualitative research which is descriptive study. According to Moleong (2004), qualitative research is a research which the data in the forms of written or oral word are analyzed descriptively. Therefore, the current paper was a descriptive study which intended to investigate classroom interactions in terms

of questions being asked by the teacher, and there was no major statistical operation used in the study. The result of this study cannot be used to represent teachers from other class in SMP Negeri 10 Kendari. The subject of the study was the classroom interaction in classes at second grade of SMP Negeri 10 Kendari , since the purpose of this study was analysis of teacher questions. The subjects who involved in the interaction are two English teachers who teach at eighth grade in SMP Negeri 10 Kendari In this study, observation was used as the instrument to collect the data. The researcher observed the teaching process by Teacher A and Teacher B at eighth grade in SMP Negeri 10 Kendari. The observation was conducted in three meetings of each teacher classes. As addition, to conduct the observation the researcher used observation protocol, and tape recorded. Every session of classroom interactions between the teacher and the participant was recorded. An interview with predetermine questions were employed in the study. The questions were taken from a questionnaire developed by Ozcan (cited in Farahian and Rezaeeb, 2012) and adapted to suit the presents study. The purpose of interview is to investigate teachers’ opinions about the questions types and their effect on students’ participation and language learning. classroom observation was employed as the main instrument to collect the data concerning teacher’s questioning behavior. To carry out this study, firstly the researcher asked permission to conduct this study to the head master of SMP Negeri 10 Kendari. The procedure of collecting the teachers’ interview, the researcher asked permission to the teacher to do interview. Then, the researcher and the teachers arranged time to do an interview. The researcher recorded and noted the interview. All the information were transcribed and translated into English for data analysis. In this research, researcher analyzed the data qualitatively. Qualitative data analysis is a way of analysis without statistic. It is used to describe the cognitive level of teachers’ questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Researcher get the qualitative information from data observation protocol and data recording. To analyze the data from interview, the researcher interpreted the data

from teachers’ interview. Every sentence of teachers’ answer to the interview was identified and described the conclusion of different answer from the teachers.

4. Finding and Discussion Finding The preliminary procedures follow in the data analysis are to compute frequencies and percentages to describe the overall characteristics of the data. Following this, the data collected through classroom observation are showed in tables, coded and changed to percentage value. The researcher obtained these results by thoroughly studying and learning all the contents of the recording questions that appeared during the observations. Then the researcher categorizes the questions according to level in Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive domain. Based on six observations in five different classes, there were 106 questions which were asked by the two teachers during the observations. Below was the data of the questions analysis based on six cognitive levels based on Bloom’s Taxonomy: Table. 4.1 Classification of the Teachers’ questions Classroom observation Observation 1st Observation 2nd Observation 3rd Observation 4th Observation 5th Observation 6th Total % of Questions Grand Total

Level LOCQ HOCQ Kno Comp App Ana Syn Eva 0 15 0 0 0 5 5 2 0 0 0 0 6 16 4 2 0 1 0 11 1 7 0 0 5 6 0 0 0 0 0 13 0 4 0 3 16 63 5 13 0 9 15.1 59.4 4.7 12.3 0 8.5 106

Kno

: Knowledge (C1)

Ana

: Analysis (C4)

Comp : Comprehension (C2)

Syn

: Synthesis (C5)

App

Eva

: Evaluation (C6)

: Application (C3)

LOCQ : Lower Order Cognitive Question HOCQ : Higher Order Cognitive Question

For more clear interpretation, the chart below presented the illustration of questions distribution of each cognitive level. Chart 4.1.Diagram of Teachers’ Questions

Percentages of Teachers' Questions Evaluation 8.5% Synthesis 0% Analysis 12.3%

Knowledge 15.1%

Application 4.7% Comprehension 59.4%

In order to answer the research question number two, the researcher classified the questions from the lowest to the highest cognitive order. Figure below showed the exactly different number of the use between lower and higher level of cognition: Chart 4.2. Distribution of lower and higher cognitive level of questions

Cognitive Level Used Lower Cognitive Level

Higher Cognitive Level

20.8% 79.2%

Based on the data, it could be seen that there was 79.2% questions asked by the teachers which is in the lower level of cognition. The rest 20.8 % was in the higher level of cognition.

Discussion The main focuses of this study were observed the cognitive level of teachers’ questions in the class related to the learning material at eighth grade in SMPN 10 Kendari. Based on the data, it could be seen that there was 79.2% questions asked by the teachers which was in the lower level of cognition. The rest 20.8 % was in the lower level of cognition. This finding is not surprising since it confirms the results of almost all the other studies that are discussed in the review of related literature in this present study. The higher cognitive level received the lowest percentage and frequency. Based on the observation, can be known that there are some levels of questions that were not used optimal by the teacher. Related to the data of teachers’ interviews, it can be known why it happened. Teachers said that for the junior high school level especially at eighth grade, the most frequently questions that asked by the teachers was the lower level which was knowledge (C1), comprehension (C2), and application (C3). For questions at the higher cognitive levels which were analysis

(C4), synthesis (C5), and evaluation (C6) it all appropriate used to students in higher grade. In the contrary, for the questions with higher cognitive level is rarely used by the teachers in the class. Regarding this issue, Ariani (2014) in her study reported that teachers used various cognitive levels of questions, but they mostly used comprehension level questions which are in the lower cognitive level. In particular context, the students should build comprehension about the learning text, and then answer the questions using their own words. Further, “so much time was spent with teachers questioning the students, most of the questions were low- level cognitive questions. Higher- order questions were also observed however, the ratio of these questions was very low” (Khan and Inamullah, 2011, p. 149). The discussion of the research result will be proposed according to the questions respectively.

5. Conclusion In the light of results and discussion the following conclusions were drawn. It was observed that the time devoted to asking questions from teachers, almost every lesson was started with the question. Among 106 questions there were 15.1% was knowledge level (C1), 59.4% was comprehension (C2), 4.7% was application (C3), 12.3% was analysis (C4), however synthesis level (C5) was not observed, and just 8.5% was evaluation (C6). Teachers placed the greatest emphasis on the lower thinking processes of knowledge, comprehension and application. The distributions question at lower and higher level showed that there was 79.2% questions asked in the lower level of cognition. The rest 20.8 % was in the higher level of cognition. Lower- order cognitive questions included knowledge (C1), comprehension (C2) and application (C3). Higher cognition include analysis (C4), synthesis (C5) , and evaluation (C6) provide critical thinking skill. Higher- order questions consist were seldom asked. Very few questions were asked at the evaluation level however synthesis based questions were not observed by the researcher during observation of teachers in their respective classes.

From this study it can be learnt that teachers can use varieties of cognitive level of questions to help students achieve their optimum learning. In addition, it also can be explored to know the reason of using certain level of questions. The types of questions asked are determined by the pedagogical purposes and students' level. Teachers thought that questioning was an important activity since it can measure the students’ understanding towards the learning material, improving students’ language developments. The use of variety of teachers’ questions based off Bloom’s Taxonomy can improve students thinking level that could be affected to their vocabulary mastery.

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