The effects of different procedural prompts on online student-generated question performance in terms of cognitive levels

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two different procedural prompts on online student-generated question performance in terms of cognitive levels. A total of 41 undergraduates enrolled in an English as a foreign language class participated in this study for four weeks. Questions the participants generated corresponding to the learning material in Zuvio, an online instant interactive system, were analyzed using the revised Bloom’s taxonomy to examine the cognitive level dispersion of student-generated questions. Four important findings were obtained. First, as a whole, students-generated questions spread across low, medium, and high cognitive levels, with more than 60% of the generated questions falling in the medium and high cognitive levels. Second, the majority of the questions generated along the ‘signal words plus the answer is’ procedural prompts were at the medium level whereas most of the questions generated along the ‘question stems’ procedural prompt were at the low level. Third, the result of the chi-square test found a significant difference between the two different procedural prompts in terms of cognitive level dispersion. Finally, despite that the ‘signal words plus the answer is’ procedural prompt appeared to be more effective in inducing a comparatively greater percentage of higher-level thinking questions, as compared to the ‘question stem’ prompt, no questions generated along the ‘signal words plus the answer is’ procedure prompt were at the highest create level. Suggestions for instructors and future studies are provided.