The Questioning and Feedback Strategies of Preschool Teachers in Rural China

• In Event: Understanding the Dynamics of Low-Resource Early Childhood Education Settings in Rural China

Abstract

Purpose
During the last decade, there has been increasing attention to teachers' use of questions and feedback in preschool classrooms. Researchers found current classroom discourse to be not responsive or challenging enough for children to practice complex language and critical thinking. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate teachers’ use of questions and feedback during shared book reading activities in rural Chinese preschool settings.

Theoretical Framework
Question. Questions serve to elicit responses, provoke thinking process, and facilitate conversations in the classroom. Categorization differs based on questions' functions, syntactic structure, cognitive demand, and other research purposes. For the current study, we adopted Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) which differentiated lower-order questions (Level 1-2: knowledge and comprehension) from higher-order questions (Level 3-6: application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). Previous studies suggested preschool teachers tended to use close-ended, lower-order questions to assess book-related knowledge. Less is known about the questioning strategies outside of English-speaking countries and what factors are associated with teachers’ particular preference toward those questions.
Feedback. Despite the wealth of research on teachers’ questions, little is known about teachers’ verbal feedback. When Li et al. (2016) studied teachers’ verbal feedback in secondary mathematics classrooms of China, they classified feedback into (1) positive feedback which encouraged students to participate; (2) negative feedback which was mostly criticism; and (3) neutral feedback which was not substantive or informative. Findings showed teachers mostly held neutral attitudes. For this study, we adapted their classification and analyzed the types of feedback in rural Chinese preschool settings.

Methods
This study utilized data from One Village One Preschool (OVOP) project. 40 book-related class observation videos were transcribed and coded by researchers. Teachers’ questions were classified based on their syntactic structure and cognitive demand. Students’ responses were coded according to the accuracy and teachers’ feedback was coded as either No Feedback, NeutralFeedback, or Informative Feedback.
Descriptive analyses were conducted to examine the use of questions and feedback. Pearson’s correlation tests were conducted to examine the relationships between the use of questions and feedback, and students’answers. Finally, simple regression models were built to explore the individual differences in teachers’ use of questions and feedback.

Results
Similar to findings from previous studies, teachers in Wenshan tended to use more lower-order and close-ended questions, mainly assessing students’ factual knowledge. Regardless of students’ performance, they predominantly used non-informative feedback, such as “okay”. Concerning teachers’ individual differences, we found a significant negative association between teachers' experience in the early childhood section and the percentage of higher-order questions in shared book reading while the influences of other background factors were not salient in the data.

Scientific Significance of The Work
This study contributed to the relatively scarce literature on preschool classroom discourse analysis in rural China. Our results would help teachers identify potential challenges and opportunities in shared book reading teaching strategies and look for clearer directions for future improvement. It would also provide a launch point for future studies and interventions in Chineseearly rural education.

Authors

• Yi Zhao, Harvard University

• Ziwen Mei, Harvard University