Abstract

Students’ achievements are results of effectiveness of school, curriculum, teacher, and their home environment. It is concluded by several studies that teachers are the most influential factor on student achievement. The role of teachers are to motivate students by encouraging them to be responsible for their own learning, maintaining an organized classroom environment, setting high standards, assigning appropriate challenges, and providing reinforcement and encouragement during tasks. Questioning is at the heart of classroom practice. Questions are the ways that a classroom teacher helps students think creatively, critically and analytically. Although teachers seem to use questioning strategies in their classrooms very often, literatures show that most of them do not know how to use them effectively. Senior students at college of education in Turkey have to take school experience course in a semester seven and teaching experience in a semester eight. During school experience, students are responsible to observe teaching-learning activities in classroom and extracurricular activities in school. Their observations consist of several categories related to teachers’ professional skills. One of them is the way a teacher uses questioning strategies. Do teachers’ questioning strategies challenge students’ thinking skills and help to improve students’ understanding? The aim of this study was to examine elementary teachers’ effectiveness based on using questioning strategy in their classrooms. The study samples are 157 student-teachers at department of elementary education. They visit classrooms from the first to fifth grades. In order to collect data, a questionnaire developed by researcher is administered to student-teachers to evaluate teacher’s effectiveness regarding the use of questioning strategy in their classroom. According to the observation of student-teachers, majority of the teachers use mainly closed questions in their teaching experiences. The teachers mainly call upon a student among those who raise their hands for answering question. The majority of the elementary teachers provide students wait-time to develop higher thought processes. Almost all teachers reward and praise student whose response is correct.