You can download the Diagnostic Questions student template here
More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello greg barton here and welcome to this tips for teachers video now in previous videos i’ve talked about my use of diagnostic questions both as my primary tool for my model of responsive teaching and also to offer potential stretch and challenge to students but in this video i want to do something slightly different with diagnostic questions because they can form part of my favorite homework activity so let’s imagine that we’ve just finished a topic a unit of teaching i hope i’d like to set to my students is this create your own diagnostic question on this topic explaining your reasoning behind each of your three incorrect answers now let me show you an example of one of my year 11’s homework on this so i can hopefully try and articulate the power of this homework so this is a maths example but hopefully the idea transfers across so this was um a unit of work on bounds upper bounds lower bounds and errors and so on and so forth and and this was one of my year 11 students josie and the homework that she produced so just think what’s involved here first you’ve got to create a question then you’ve got to get that question correct but then you’ve got to come up with three plausible wrong answers and articulate the reasons for those wrong answers now i think that’s about as close to mastering a topic as you can get you’re demonstrating not just that you understand it but you also understand how people could possibly not understand it and you can communicate that now since i’ve been talking about this and lots of schools have tried this and built this into their homework policy and produced templates to help students structure their work on this now um on the tips for teachers web page for this video i’ll put this template below as a download just in case you want to use it but it’s dead dead simple question here four answers there and then your reasons for each of your three wrong answers i absolutely love it no extra prep needed from me it’s kind of self-differentiating and it really gives the students an opportunity to shine and be creative one twist there’s a real danger that we dive in too quick with a homework like this for students it’s really really challenging so to give this the best chance of working what i recommend is you first use diagnostic questions regularly for at least three weeks in class and by that i mean you use them as a tool of formative assessment or responsive teaching so students get used to realizing that it’s not just one right answer and three wrong answers but actually those wrong answers are really important and if you discuss them in class why might somebody choose b why might somebody choose c students get used to the concept of diagnostic questions which will hopefully help them write better ones if you set it as a homework activity so what do you think about that and do you like that idea is there any way that you could use it for your subject what would you need to change to make it work for you and if you found this tip useful i’d be so grateful if you could like the video subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and visit tipsforteachers.co.uk where you’ll find more tips like this thanks so much for watching