Evaluation

The NRP found seventeen studies that experimentally examined question answering instruction teaching students how to find answers available in the text .

Grade Level

Question answering begins with students in grade 3 and has been studied up to grade 8.  The distribution of grade levels reported are: level 3, n=2; level 4, n=3; level 5, n=3; level 6, n=1; and level 8, n=1.  The preponderance of studies, then, have been on grades 3 through 5.

Experimenter Tests

Improvement in performance by treatment versus control groups is reported on Question Answering (9 studies), Looking back in Text (3 studies), Question Generation (1 study), and Recall (1 study).

Standardized Tests

There are no reports on the use standardized tests in abstracts of the Question Answering studies surveyed.

Summary of Evaluation of Question Answering.

Direct Instruction of Question Answering leads to an improvement in answering questions after reading passages and in strategies of finding answers.  This improvement occurs over grades 3 through 8.