QFT

Created: 2024-02-12 14:32:07 - Touched: 2024-12-09 15:14:18 - Status: Stable

What it is

The Question Formulation Technique is a set of skills designed primarily to improve one's ability to craft a useful, effective question. Secondly, they serve to engage one's mind with a particular topic in an inquisitive manner, such that the mind will be more receptive to learning information about that topic. To this end, it's critical that the questions raised as part of the process cover a wide variety of angles related to the topic, so that the most information can be absorbed, understood and retained. While it's certainly still possible to retain information on the topic that doesn't directly address questions raised during QFT, the whole point is to increase retention, so one may as well maximize that effect as far as reasonably possible.

The QFT follows the following steps. Outlined here is how to teach it. Not all of the discussion points are required to use it once the technique is understood and practiced.

How to do it

Explain what a QFocus is and is not

A QFocus, or question focus, is a topic that one wishes to learn more about. It should not be too broad (Air, the French Revolution), nor should it be too narrow (applications of fibonacci heaps in 2d pathfinding algorithms). It needs to be broad enough to be easy to generate good questions about, but narrow enough that you can address a large portion of its surface area during question generation. It's a balance between coming up with enough questions, and having the questions produce a representative covering the topic. Some people suggest a qfocus can include a picture, a title or quote from an article, etc. Something upon which question generation can be focused.

A qfocus is not a question, or stated in the form of a question. A qfocus that is itself a question already frames the topic within a specific narrow inquisitive context that will make further question generation unnecessarily difficult.

In practical terms for the individual studying solo, the qfocus might be a chapter title or important concept.

Explain the rules for generating questions

This step is only important during teaching of QFT. Experienced QFT folks should already know the rules, or only need a cursory review.

Don't start generating questions yet. First we must discuss the rules for the questions. There are four rules for generating the questions:

  1. Ask as many questions as you can.
  2. Do not discuss or debate the questions.
  3. Write every question down exactly as it was asked. No editing.
  4. Reword any statement into the form of a question.

The purpose of QFT is to generate good questions about a topic. At this stage in the process, the aim is to generate questions without regard to whether they are good or not. This is a braindump technique, intended to bypass the brain's innate desire to refine during the creative process. If allowed to edit or analyze the questions, this will slow down the flow of ideas that can be stated in the form of questions, and may restrict the breadth of questions produced. Right now, we just want as many questions as possible, produced as naturally as possible as the mind flits between ideas. Sometimes those ideas will come out of one's head in the form of a statement rather than a question, and in such a case, one can either restate it during this step, or immediately afterwards.

Discuss which rules might be easy/difficult

Applicable again only to teaching QFT. Ask the students questions about the rules that have just been introduced. Which ones do they think will be the most challenging to follow? Which is the easiest? Ask if any of the rules don't make sense, or if they're unsure how to follow them.

This step gets the students engaged with understanding the process. By having them discuss the pros and cons of each rule, they will better internalize the rules and why they're important. They can also try to foresee obstacles to their implementation, and devise strategies to meet those obstacles.

Introduce the QFocus

Once the students are familiar with the rules (assuming you have students), it's time to bring out the qfocus. At this point, everything should have already been discussed, and further discussion is likely to be about the qfocus itself rather than the process, which we wish to avoid. Announce that you will present them with the qfocus, and having revealed it, they are expected to immediately use the preceding rules to begin generating questions.

Generate questions

Following the rules above, write down as many questions about the qfocus as one can imagine. Try to think about the qfocus from a wide variety of viewpoints to generate a wide variety of questions, so that you can learn the most about the topic as possible. This process should have a time limit, often about 5 minutes. It may be helpful to set a timer.

The teacher should not interrupt, or mediate discussions about questions. Such discussions aren't allowed under rule 2. The teacher should also not provide examples of questions about the qfocus. If students are stumped coming up with any questions at all, remind them that questions often include the words who, what, when, where, why, and how. This is often sufficient to get them started, and once moving, questions seem to inspire more questions.

Discuss the difference between open/closed questions

Again, when teaching. Once we've generated a reasonable quantity of questions, the natural inclination is to move on to the analysis step. However, this is a great opportunity to enter a side discussion on the difference between an open question and a closed one.

An open question is one that does not have one specific answer, but instead requires the answerer to think and analyze and formulate a complex response. An example of an open question might be, "why are jokes funny?" or "what was the most important factor in the allies winning ww2?" An open question is one that yields creative direction of the conversation to the answerer.

A closed question, in contrast, is a question that has a single specific answer, and isn't intended to have the answerer construct a creative response. For example, "how old are you?" or "who was the first president of the United States?" These questions are designed to elicit a very specific piece of information in response, and return control of the conversation to the asker.

This is often a good opportunity to inject an EMS example. "Why did you call 911 today?" is an open-ended question, intended to elicit a complex creative answer from the patient. "Have you ever been diagnosed with high blood pressure?" is a closed question, intended to elicit a yes or no response before returning control of the conversation to the medic, who can proceed to ask additional questions about specific aspects of treatment.

There may be discussion about whether one type of question is "better" than another, and it's worth engaging in some debate about this. Ultimately they are tools, each suited to a different purpose. One isn't better than another in all circumstances, and the student needs to learn how to ask both, and when asking one is more appropriate than the other.

Convert one open question to closed, and one closed to open

Once the students understand the distinction between open and closed questions, have them look back through their list of generated questions, and classify each one as open or closed. Help navigate any debate that occurs during this classification, but don't provide all the answers. There is some amount of grey area.

Once the questions are classified, have the students select one open question to restate as closed, and one closed question to restate as open. This will not be a perfect 1-to-1 translation of the questions, by necessity. Some amount of creativity will be involved, and the types of information gleaned from the change will be different, by design. The point isn't that the old version of the questions were wrong or inferior. This is just a concrete opportunity to put the knowledge of open vs closed into practice, which will help solidify the concept in their minds.

Discuss the process of prioritizing questions for different purposes

We now have a large list of questions about the qfocus. What do we do with them? Are they all of equal value in trying to learn about the topic? What are some ways we might choose to prioritize the questions we've generated? For example, we might want to use these questions to:

The intended use of the questions affects how we prioritize them. We often will not have a chance to fully explore and answer all of the questions, for example if we needed to ask them during a lecture or recitation. Picking which questions are the most important is just as valuable a skill as generating them in the first place.

Analyze the questions asked, and prioritize/select questions to meet a certain goal

Now that we understand that prioritization is important, and have explored several options of things we may wish to optimize for, pick such an optimization target and prioritize the questions appropriately. For example:

This is another timed exercise, and should take 5-10 minutes. There should be lots of debate at this point, but the focus should be on debating existing questions, not generating new ones.

Discuss the process

Once everyone has had a chance to generate questions and analyze them, discuss how things went. Were they surprised by how many questions they were able to think up? Which of the generation rules turned out to be the most difficult to follow? Were any of the questions bad or unusable? Of the questions selected during the analysis phase, did they tend to be open, closed, or a mix? Do they feel like they know a little more about how to ask a good question? How do they plan to use this technique in their own studying? Do they feel that asking questions about the topic before it's covered in class or textbook will help them be more curious about the material and retain it better? What would they change about the process? Will they use it again for the rest of the class?

When to apply it

The QFT is most useful at the beginning of studying, before the topic is introduced and explored. Asking the questions and engaging with the generated questions puts hooks in the student's mind, causing them to be more receptive to the specific piece of knowledge that answers the questions they've asked. This is the difference between reading through a whole page of text and losing focus, vs looking for one specific piece of information in the text and having it jump out at you.

By asking the questions prior to exposure to the material, the hooks will be more effective at engaging the student as the material becomes available. It also avoids the danger of conflating recognition with recollection, because the material can't be glossed over if it hasn't been consumed yet. The questions generated before the topic is explored also tend to result in better mock exam questions, in my experience. The benefits for coming up with a topic for research paper, experiment, etc should be obvious.

Apply QFT at the beginning of a class, before heading into lecture, before starting a new chapter in the textbook, and before starting assignments like papers and surveys and experiments. The majority of the benefit comes long after the question is asked, so it's critical that they be written down and well formatted. For example, list the questions at the top of the page before starting to take notes in lecture. They can be later used as bullet point headings for revised notes, and as review questions to ensure that everything asked was covered when the notes are complete.

The questions are also great to share with other students. This can take the form of generating and analyzing the questions as a group, or by following QFT individually and bringing the results to the group, or a hybrid of the two.

Once you've used QFT to prime your mind with questions about new material, use SQ3R to explore the material effectively. It also pairs well with many other learning strategies.

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