Classroom observation data help identify effective uses of "why" questions in math education

Math teachers often ask students “why” questions to encourage their engagement and to hear their mathematical reasoning. Authors Melhuish et al. analyzed videotaped classroom math lessons, with instructors teaching 4th through 8th graders from three school districts that had been given low, middle, and high quality of instruction scores. From ICPSR, the authors used the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness Main Study, which contains coded videotaped math instruction observation data, as well as student assessments and teacher surveys, collected between 2010 and 2013. They found that “why” questions appeared in about two-thirds of all the classroom lessons they evaluated, regardless of instructional quality. With further analysis, they found that the “why” questions used by teachers could sound quite similar, but they ultimately supported differing levels of student reasoning. Student responses to these questions could range from being rote and merely factual, to answers with nuanced justifications. The context, the teacher’s phrasing, and the teacher’s modeled expected responses to “why” questioning all mattered, and were correlated with significant variation in student activity in the math lessons.