The Role of Knowledge in Inquiry: Changes in Question-Asking Ability and its Impact on Academic Assessment

Question-asking is a fundamental part of human communication and integral to cognitive development and education. Yet although previous research has examined questions in non-longitudinal lab settings, there is sparse research on how our question asking originality and complexity changes over time and how it is influenced by knowledge acquired. In the current study we investigate the effect of acquired knowledge on question asking and its predictive ability of educational outcomes such as final tests and projects. Undergraduate university students (N = 68) who participated in a semester-long “Intro to Psychology” course were assessed on their general and course specific question asking ability (originality and complexity) using two question asking tasks. They completed these tasks at the beginning and end of their semester-long course, alongside open-ended final projects and an end of class multiple choice closed-ended test. We find that students’ domain-specific question asking ability improved during the course, yet general question asking ability stagnated and even declined. Both general and specific question asking ability were negatively correlated with closed-ended test scores, while general ability was positively correlated with open-ended final project scores. These novel results highlight the important role of knowledge in question asking, and the potential of question asking ability in predicting and perhaps improving education assessment outcomes. They also advance our understanding of the way we ask questions, the differences between open- and closed-ended assessment and pave the way for future pedagogical interventions based on enhancing question asking ability.