Effects of academic achievement and group composition on quality of student-generated questions and use patterns of online procedural prompts

The main purpose of this study was to examine if and how academic achievement and group composition affect quality of online student-generated questions. In addition, the use patterns of online procedural prompts by students of different academic achievement and gender group composition were investigated. A total of 41 intermediate-level college sophomores enrolled in an English as a foreign language class participated in this study for four weeks. An online instant interactive system, Zuvio, was adopted to support in-class student-generated questions activities. All questions students generated corresponding to the study material were categorized along the revised Bloom's taxonomy for classifying the quality of student-generated questions, and content analysis along the integrated online procedural prompts (i.e., signal words plus the answer is; generic question stems) was adopted to reveal use patterns. Five important findings were obtained. First, students in both low- and high-academic levels generated the majority of questions in the high cognitive level. Second, more questions generated by students in all-male and mixed-gender groups fell in the high cognitive level than in the low cognitive level whereas there is an equal distribution of low and high cognitive level questions generated by the all-female group. Third, the results of the Fisher's exact test found no significant relations between academic achievement and quality of student-generated questions. Fourth, the results of the chi-square test of independence found no significant relations between gender group compositions (i.e., all-male, all-female, mixed-gender) and quality of student-generated questions. Finally, the results of content analysis revealed that while some same use patterns of online procedural prompts were observed for students in the low- and high academic achievement levels and different gender group composition, slightly varied use patterns by students in different academic levels and gender composition were present. Suggestions for instruction and future studies are provided.