Tuval Raz

Hello, Dave.

Yeah, I think that's the, of course, you sort of touched on the heart of this sort of paradox or sort of contrast.

We want to encourage our students to ask good questions.

But our research actually shows that if we test them on question asking and then measure their success through these sort of standardized tests, we see that the ones who actually ask the most creative questions, the most complex questions are actually the ones who do poor on these standardized tests.

There is a sort of silver lining because we do that.

We see that they improve on these sort of open ended tasks where there isn't one correct answer.

But sadly, research shows that over 70 percent of tests in courses in academia are actually standardized tests.

So we're actually measuring them on things that hurt them.

So, pardon the pun, but that's a good question.

Yeah, there are all sorts of questions when you think about it.

You can have these sorts of questions you ask yourself, like, what am I doing?

That's not really the type of question that we're dealing with here.

We're talking about something called epistemic questions.

They sort of come from an information sort of viewpoint.

You want to learn something.

And you launch this question into the world and you hope that the information you get will please you.

You hope it'll be good enough.

And if not, you ask another question.

And when we started doing these sorts of studies a couple of years ago, there wasn't really a standard metric or sort of consensus on how we measure a good question.

We had some work with kids, but there also wasn't a lot of work on adults.