Teaching Students to Generate Questions: A Review of the Intervention Studies

This is a review of intervention studies in which students have been taught to generate questions as a means of improving their comprehension. Overall, teaching students the cognitive strategy of generating questions about the material they had read resulted in gains in comprehension, as measured by tests given at the end of the intervention. All tests were based on new material. The overall median effect size was 0.36 (64th percentile) when standardized tests were used and 0.86 (81st percentile) when experimenter-developed comprehension tests were used. The traditional skill-based instructional approach and the reciprocal teaching approach yielded similar results.