In the early 1960s, three young children growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts ("Adam," "Eve," and "Sarah") received a regular visit from a researcher each month. Armed with a tape recorder, the researcher recorded each child's spontaneous speech, typically directed at parents. These visits were part of a groundbreaking study directed by Harvard psycholinguist Roger Brown (1973), designed to find out how children gradually move from telegraphic, two- or three-word utterances to more elaborate sentences.
As time went on, more children joined the initial group of three; the researchers transcribed everything the children said and performed hundreds of analyses of the children's speech. In the 1980s, Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow entered these transcripts as some of the first documents in their Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), which has grown into a huge database that allows researchers to take a close look at how children acquire language.
Recently, researchers have conducted analyses that have expanded beyond the study of syntax. In particular, children's questions have come under the spotlight.
Past Doubts About Questions
Surprisingly, there's been a long tradition of skepticism about the value of children's questions as a learning tool—variously expressed by philosophers, educators, and psychologists (Harris, 2012). In Emile, his classic work on education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762/1979) argued that supplying answers to children's questions would make them too trusting of adult authority and that it was better for children to work out answers for themselves.
The English educator Susan Isaacs (1930) agreed. In setting out her teaching philosophy, she explained that teachers at the progressive school she founded in Cambridge, England, were encouraged not to answer children's questions but to give them the means to figure out the answers. If children wondered why it was difficult to set fire to wet straw, they were given some water, matches, and straw to experiment with. If they asked what was inside a frog, they were supplied with knives and dead specimens to dissect.
Psychologists, too, expressed doubts about the value of children's questions, for different reasons. James Sully (1896/2000) and Jean Piaget (1926) thought that children's frequent why questions betray their naiveté about the way the world works. Young children, they argued, mistakenly assume that everything has a purpose. So when children ask, "Why can you see lightning at night?" or "Why does the wind blow?" they are trying to find out what benefit the phenomenon in question produces rather than trying to understand cause and effect.
All these negative judgments on children's questions were impressionistic; they were not based on any systematic analysis of the questions children ask. Indeed, despite his huge impact on thinking about education, Rousseau had little day-to-day contact with children, including his own. Isaacs, Sully, and Piaget extrapolated from the diary notes kept by parents or teachers. Tape recorders, of course, were not available as research tools when these writers made their pronouncements.
Are children's questions welcome in contemporary U.S. classrooms? In the best early childhood settings, teachers are inclined to attend to children's questions. Indeed, in progressive preschool models, such as High-Scope and Reggio Emilia, teachers often develop children's questions into curricular themes that organize learning activity for weeks or months.
But in most early childhood settings, teachers have neither the preparation nor the resources to respond systematically. To answer children's questions about technical or esoteric topics (How do computers work? What kind of a bug is this?), adults would need time and support to find answers, let alone to plan curricular activities that are truly responsive to the questions. Thus, even if many early childhood educators value children's questions as a source of learning, few are in a position to exploit such questions optimally.
By 1st grade, children's questions rarely guide classroom activities. Particularly in schools serving children who are most at academic risk, structured literacy and math instruction is prioritized; many districts mandate that children receive 90–120 minutes of literacy instruction and 60–90 minutes of math instruction a day. That leaves little time for activities that don't align with state content standards. The kind of divergent learning that might result from following children's questions wherever they lead may appear hard to justify in schools struggling to raise scores on high-stakes assessments.
Children Are Bursting with Questions
Most adults who spend time with preschoolers will need little persuasion that they're capable of asking lots of questions. Yet these adults are likely to underestimate just how many questions young children actually ask under conducive circumstances.
Taking advantage of the intensive, naturalistic recordings pioneered by Roger Brown and his students, Michele Chouinard (2007) conducted a comprehensive analysis of the questions asked by four children. In all, she looked at 25,000 questions culled from more than 200 hours of recordings. She found that when they were talking with a familiar adult at home, children asked one to three questions each minute. Some of the questions that children asked were practical; for example, they requested help (Can you fix this for me?); permission (Can I go outside?); or clarification (What did you say?). But about two-thirds of children's questions were aimed at obtaining information.
Children often asked for factual information, especially about names (What's that?); functions (What does it do?); locations (Where is my ball?); or actions (What is he doing?). Such simple, factual questions dominated children's questioning until they were approximately 2 and one-half years old. At that point, they also began to ask how and why questions; indeed, among 3-year-olds, explanation-seeking questions accounted for about one-quarter of the total. They asked about matters ranging far and wide, from the practical to the metaphysical: Why you put some water in there, Mom? How come I cannot go outside? Why doesn't the butter stay on top of hot toast? and How did God put flesh on us and make what's inside us?
It's worth dwelling on the sheer frequency of these how and why questions. From Chouinard's data, we can calculate that the four preschoolers asked for an explanation about 25 times per hour. If we make the relatively conservative assumption that these four preschoolers spent, on average, an hour at home each day with a familiar caregiver, that caregiver would have the opportunity to answer more than 20,000 explanation-seeking questions before the child reached his or her 5th birthday.
Given these huge numbers, it seems likely that children can learn a lot from asking questions. Of course, exactly what they learn depends on how their questions are answered.
The Effects of Answers
Frazier, Gelman, and Wellman (2009) extended Chouinard's analysis by studying the various replies that children received, especially to their explanation-seeking questions. Not surprisingly, children didn't always obtain satisfactory answers. Sometimes, parents simply said they didn't know the answer. Sometimes, they implied that the question was misplaced—for example, the child might ask, "How can snakes hear if they don't have ears?" and be told, "I don't think they can hear." Still, children did receive an informative reply to about one-third of their explanation-seeking questions.
How children responded to these answers tells us something about why children ask questions in the first place. If they ask questions simply to get an adult's attention, we might expect them to have responded in much the same way to satisfactory and unsatisfactory answers. In fact, however, these children reacted differently. If they received a satisfactory answer, they often expressed agreement or followed up with another question on the same topic. But if they received an unsatisfactory answer, they were more likely to offer their own explanation or to ask their question a second time. Apparently, when children ask a why or how question, they're genuinely seeking information.
A study conducted by Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes (1984) suggests that family background is likely to affect the interplay between children's questions and the answers they receive. When these researchers recorded English 4-year-olds talking to their mothers at home, they found that middle-class children were more likely than working-class children to ask explanation-seeking questions. They also noticed that mothers who asked a lot of questions had children who also asked a lot of questions. By implication, children may be influenced by messages they receive about how to have a conversation. If their mother uses language to gather information, they are more likely to do the same.
More recent data point to another likely factor—the way that parents respond to their children's questions. Kathleen Corriveau and her students examined child language recordings in which family background had been systematically varied: Half of the 4-year-olds came from middle class professional homes, and half came from lower-class, nonprofessional homes (Kurkul, Ward, Dwyer, & Corriveau, 2015). The two sets of children were similar in terms of the relative proportions of simple, factual questions they asked as compared with more complex, explanation-seeking questions. Further, both sets of children received more satisfactory than unsatisfactory replies to their factual questions. Finally, when they received unsatisfactory answers to such a factual question, both sets of children typically responded by repeating or elaborating on their initial question or by supplying their own answer, confirming the pattern of selective reaction found by Frazier and her colleagues.
When it came to the way parents responded to the explanation-seeking questions, however, social-class differences emerged. Middle-class parents provided more exemplary answers and fewer unsatisfactory answers. In addition, when the two sets of children received unsatisfactory answers, they reacted differently. The children from lower-class families often repeated their question but never volunteered an explanation of their own. In contrast, the children from middle-class families volunteered an explanation just as often as they repeated their question. In sum, the middle-class children were more likely to receive a helpful explanation and more likely to generate one for themselves.
Here, we begin to see how Rousseau misread children's development. He assumed that answering children's questions would lead them to defer to adult authority. But these findings suggest that, on the contrary, answering children's questions helps them think for themselves.
When Children Go to School
The young children discussed so far were recorded in their own homes, talking to a familiar adult, typically their mother. What happens when children go to school? Do they ask lots of questions there as well?
In the study of English 4-year-olds described earlier, Tizard and Hughes (1984) recorded the conversations of 4-year-olds not just at home with their mothers, but also in nursery school. The children behaved quite differently in the two settings. They asked many more questions at home; indeed, they often asked a series of interconnected questions, all probing the same topic. In nursery school, this kind of sustained dialogue almost never occurred.
Why do children ask fewer questions at school? One obvious explanation is that the home setting and the school setting are different social contexts. A teacher surrounded by a dozen or more children might have few practical opportunities to engage in a long dialogue with a single child. Another possibility is that a teacher is less likely than a parent to have a detailed knowledge of an individual child's knowledge base, idiosyncratic preferences, and family history, making appropriate answers more difficult.
Beyond these practical considerations, however, it's plausible that a pedagogic factor is at work. Tizard and Hughes noticed not only that children had fewer and shorter conversations with teachers than with their mothers, but also that the tenor of those conversations was different. First, teachers tended to talk more than the child, whereas conversations in the home were more evenly balanced. Second, teachers characteristically asked a series of questions, and the child's primary role was answering them. These exchanges often involved teachers probing for a specific answer, sometimes in vain and sometimes needlessly.
For example, consider 4-year-old June. She went to her teacher with a piece of paper and asked, "Can you cut that in half?" Having obliged, the teacher seized on a teaching moment. "How many pieces of paper have you got?" she asked. "Two" said June. The teacher went on: "Two. What have I done if I've cut it down the middle?" "Two pieces" said June. The teacher tried again: "I've cut it in …?" After four such unsuccessful attempts to elicit the answer she was looking for, the teacher supplied it herself: "I've cut it … in half" (overlooking the fact that June had spontaneously introduced this concept when she made her initial request).
In a provocative study of social studies lessons in grades 3–6, Edwin Susskind (1979) compared teachers' views about questions in the classroom with reality. He began by asking teachers how many questions they actually asked in class and what the desirable number of questions to ask would be. Happily, the two figures were similar—teachers reckoned that, on average, they asked a question every two minutes, which was also the rate they judged to be desirable. Teachers thought that the students should also ask a question every two minutes, but they believed that their students fell somewhat short of that ideal, asking a question every three minutes.
With these data in hand, Susskind went on to observe the actual rate of questions in 32 classrooms. It turned out that teachers asked a lot more questions than they realized—almost two questions a minute. Student questions, on the other hand, occurred at a rate of only about three or four per hour. Putting this another way, the teachers thought that it would be good if they asked questions at the same rate as their students, but they actually asked questions nearly 30 times as often.
When we consider that the data were aggregated across the entire class of students, we can see that the majority of students were sitting in class for hours without asking a single question—a sharp contrast to the pattern observed among preschoolers at home. Admittedly, classroom practices may have changed since Susskind's study was carried out, but given the continuing constraints on teachers, we're probably still a long way from replicating in schools the frequent how and why questions Chouinard observed between young children and their caregivers.
Becoming More Aware
Young children ask lots of questions at home, and they follow up on the answers with more questions. It's clear that they're genuinely seeking information. But when children enter preschool, the pattern changes; there, the teacher tends to ask the questions. By the time they're in grade school, many students ask no questions whatsoever.
In an interesting aside on his work with teachers, Susskind explains that when he reported his findings back to them, several dismissed them as nonsense. Only when they agreed to tape their classes and analyze the tapes themselves did they acknowledge how many questions they asked and how few their students asked.
The lesson for other teachers: If we listen carefully, both to ourselves and to our students, we can become more aware of whether our classrooms provide the supportive environments children need to get the greatest benefits from their early tendency to ask questions.
Author's note: I am grateful to Catherine Snow, who contributed to this article with helpful information concerning the curriculum and the role of questions in U.S. preschools and schools.
