Socratic flipped classroom : What types of questions and tasks promote learning?

Socratic questioning stresses the importance of questioning for learning. Flipped Classroom pedagogy generates a need for effective questions and tasks in order to promote active learning. This paper describes a project aimed at finding out how different kinds of questions and tasks support students’ learning in a flipped classroom context. In this study, during the flipped courses, both the questions and tasks were distributed together with video recordings. Answers and solutions were presented and discussed in seminars, with approximately 10 participating students in each seminar. Information Systems students from three flipped classroom courses at three different levels were interviewed in focus groups about their perceptions of how different kinds of questions and tasks supported their learning process. The selected courses were organized differently, with various kinds of questions and tasks. Course one included open questions that were answered and presented at the seminar. Students also solved a task and presented the solution to the group. Course two included open questions and a task. Answers and solutions were discussed at the seminars where students also reviewed each other’s answers and solutions. Course three included online single- and multiple choice questions with real-time feedback. Answers were discussed at the seminar, with the focus on any misconceptions. In this paper we categorized the questions in accordance with Wilson (2016) as factual, convergent, divergent, evaluative, or a combination of these. In all, we found that any comprehensible question that initiates a dialogue, preferably with a set of Socratic questions, is perceived as promoting learning. This is why seminars that allow such questions and discussion are effective. We found no differences between the different kinds of Socratic questions. They were seen to promote learning so long as they made students reflect and problematize the questions. To conclude, we found that questions and tasks promote learning when they are answered and solved in a process that is characterized by comprehensibility, variation, repetition and activity.