We, human beings, are inquisitive by nature. We ask questions regularly and answer many too, almost every day. The purpose is not just to talk or communicate, but to deepen our understanding of a subject or topic. That’s the very reason why questions are indispensable in the education domain too. They are an important source of knowledge assessment, and in turn, filling out any gaps.
Educators use different types of questions to assess learners, the most basic ones being – factual questions. Factual questions have a clear single answer which is found in the learning content. The learner doesn’t really have to comprehend the text or think logically to answer them, a simple recall would let them answer the question correctly. For instance, the following questions would come under the category of factual questions.
- Who is president of America?
- What is the capital of Japan?
- Where was the first case of the 2019–20 Coronavirus outbreak identified?
All the above questions have only one fact-based answer. Not undermining their importance in any way, but factual questions are good when you just want the learner to remember specific things. The idea is to take the learner into the learning content and have them remember important things.
But, when you want learners to think beyond what is written and derive logical interpretations, interpretive questions are probably what you need to ask. Interpretive questions usually start with why or how and build upon the learning content. They might have more than one answer and usually aim to take the learner through the content. Learners are required to revisit content to collect supporting evidence since the answers to interpretive questions might be debatable.
For instance, here are some generic interpretive questions that could apply to multiple content pieces.
- What patterns do you sense in this whole writeup?
- What were some of the positive effects of this situation?
- What do you think is the ultimate reason Google collects so much of our personal information?
Interpretive questions generally spark and keep discussions going. Apart from all the earlier mentioned considerations, interpretive questions come with some implicit benefits for learners like stimulating their comprehension and reasoning abilities and improving their oral and written language.
Quillionz Pro, the premium version of Quillionz – world’s first AI-powered question generator, now also generates higher-order interpretive questions. When Quillionz was launched, it could create a variety of questions on your content, including multiple-choice questions, recall questions and short descriptive questions, but higher-order questions were a distant dream. It mostly generated factual questions that required learners to identify and recall specific entities, keywords, and phrases, define key terms, and describe key ideas encountered in the content.
Then came Quillionz Pro, where the question quality got better, generation-time got shorter, and output formats got wider. And now, with the launch of interpretive questions in Quillionz Pro, you can get questions that evaluate the learners’ ability to draw parallels or comparisons, infer implied causal relationships, or explain implicit themes and concepts in the content. With all these added advantages, there is no reason why an educator should not be trying out this tool. Available at a nominal price of $9.99/month or $24.99/3 months, Quillionz Pro can be purchased here.
Leave a Comment