Question banks have many benefits and should be a commonly used and shared resource across year groups (primary) and departments (secondary). Question banks are an integral element of curriculum design and lesson planning. They contain a bank of essential questions that learners should be able to answer, focusing on the core curriculum content and knowledge. The information students are required to know can range from key facts to significant dates, individuals, quotes or vocabulary, and they are known in cognitive psychology as ‘target memories’. Depending on the intended learning outcomes and curricular progression, the questions in the question bank can cover everything from recall to application to novel situations of the information.
The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review (Coe et al., 2020) explores the importance of questioning in the classroom. The review states, “Questioning is already one of the commonest things teachers do, and the key to quality is not the number of questions but the type and how they are used”.
Although it seems logical for every school to have a shared area with question banks for teachers, this does not always happen. Common sense does not always equate with common practice! Instead, teachers may resort to writing their own questions and designing their own quizzes for their classes, working in isolation rather than through collaboration. Teachers may prefer this approach, as it supports teacher autonomy and independence. However, there are many benefits which argue in favor of the use of question banks.
- Quality assurance with question design
Designing effective questions that require students to think hard and serve a purpose from checking for understanding or providing opportunities for retrieval practice, is not always easy to do. Through collaboration, discussion and reflection with question design, this can lead to quality assurance and consistency about the effectiveness, reliability and validity of the questions asked. Colleagues across a department, school, multi-academy trust, or subject and phase communities can offer one another support, assistance and feedback with question design when question banks are used collectively.
2. Support teacher workload
Instead of teachers spending time writing questions for each of their classes or units or topics, having question banks in a shared area that teachers can access can naturally support teacher workload. The questions within the question banks can be used at different stages of the learning process, from the encoding stage to check for accuracy with understanding to long-term recall. Referring to question banks can save teachers time with lesson planning; each year the questions are there for teachers to use. Of course, they can be adapted if necessary, but the time-consuming task of writing and designing questions can be significantly reduced with question banks.
3. Support for Early Career Teachers
An important aspect of initial teacher training is to understand the purpose of questioning in the classroom and develop the ability to ask appropriate and desirably difficult questions to ensure learners make progress. Question banks do not necessarily remove the task of question design for early career teachers (ECTs), but instead can be used to offer support and guidance. If an ECT has access to question banks, with relevant questions for the content they are teaching, not only will that reduce their workload, but it can also help to develop their confidence, understanding and skills about effective questioning.
4. Enables teacher autonomy to co-exist alongside consistency
Teachers have their own style and preferences in their classroom. Teacher autonomy is important, but so is consistency. The classes in a year group (all mixed ability, for example) will all be taught the same curriculum with shared learning intentions. Therefore, the target memories, content and skills will be consistent across classes. Question banks ensure all learners are able to answer the same questions and recall the essential information. However, there are opportunities for flexibility with question banks.
Teachers across a department can refer to the question banks and decide how they want to present the question to their classes. One teacher may wish to ask the questions to the class using an online quizzing tool, whereas another teacher may include the questions on presentation slides for students to answer using mini whiteboards or in their class books. The questions being asked are the same, but the approach can be selected by individual teachers based on their skills, preferences or knowledge of the learners in their class and what they believe will work best.
5. Question banks can be used for self, pair, and parental quizzing
All of the previous benefits have focused on question banks supporting teachers; however, the question banks can also be shared with students and their parents. Through sharing question banks, either digitally or with paper copies, this can allow students to self-quiz and self-assess their answers. Alternatively the question banks can be used for paired quizzing, inside or outside of the classroom.
Parents may wish to support their child/children at home but can lack the confidence, knowledge or skills to do so if they are not familiar with the curriculum content. Question banks can be presented as quiz sheets with questions and answers provided to support revision and study at home.
Final thoughts
As with many tools in a teacher’s metaphorical toolbox, question banks offer multiple uses. Their support for teaching, and for learning, is multifaceted—and offers a way that also can alleviate demands on teachers’ time. Question banks offer a clear example of common sense that should (and could!) simply be common practice.
The Great Teaching Toolkit contains an online course focusing on questioning to activate hard thinking, to find out more about this course click here.
Reference
Coe, R., Rauch, C.J., Kime, S., & Singleton, D. (2020). Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence review. Evidence Based Education. https://evidencebased.education/great-teaching-toolkit-evidence-review/
