instruction is prioritized; many districts mandate that children receive
90–120 minutes of literacy instruction
and 60–90 minutes of math instruction
a day. That leaves little time for activities that don’t align with state content
standards. The kind of divergent
learning that might result from following children’s questions wherever
they lead may appear hard to justify in
schools struggling to raise scores on
high-stakes assessments.
Children Are Bursting
with Questions
Most adults who spend time with pre-
schoolers will need little persuasion
that they’re capable of asking lots of
questions. Yet these adults are likely
to underestimate just how many ques-
tions young children actually ask
under conducive circumstances.
Taking advantage of the intensive,
naturalistic recordings pioneered by
Roger Brown and his students, Michele
Chouinard (2007) conducted a comprehensive analysis of the questions
asked by four children. In all, she
looked at 25,000 questions culled from
more than 200 hours of recordings.
She found that when they were talking
with a familiar adult at home, children
asked one to three questions each
minute. Some of the questions that
children asked were practical; for
example, they requested help (Can
you fix this for me?); permission (Can
I go outside?); or clarification (What
did you say?). But about two-thirds
of children’s questions were aimed at
obtaining information.
Children often asked for factual
information, especially about names
(What’s that?); functions (What does
it do?); locations (Where is my ball?);
or actions (What is he doing?). Such
simple, factual questions dominated
children’s questioning until they were
approximately 2 and one-half years
old. At that point, they also began to
ask how and why questions; indeed,
among 3-year-olds, explanation-seeking questions accounted for about
one-quarter of the total. They asked
about matters ranging far and wide,
from the practical to the metaphysical:
Why you put some water in there,
Mom? How come I cannot go outside?
Why doesn’t the butter stay on top of
hot toast? and How did God put flesh
on us and make what’s inside us?
It’s worth dwelling on the sheer
frequency of these how and why
questions. From Chouinard’s data,
we can calculate that the four preschoolers asked for an explanation
Children can learn
a lot from asking
questions. Of course,
exactly what they
learn will depend on
how satisfactorily their
questions are answered.
