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Expert Q&A

Strategies to Understand the Question

What are some strategies to help a student understand what the question is demanding?

One excellent research-based strategy to help students understand what the question is demanding is called the Question-Answer relationship (QAR). This strategy helps students decipher where the answer to the question can be found:  “right there” in the text, whether it’s a question asking them to pull together pieces of information found throughout the text, whether they need to answer based on their own experience, or a little of each of those! Typically it’s the questions based on implicit information that gives students the most difficulty.