Hinge Questions

“Asking questions” is probably one of the most basic and ubiquitous classroom techniques teachers use to check student understanding and there’s a wealth of research to show that, done well, it’s an effective learning tool.

There’s also no shortage of advice about how to structure questions effectively, although, this being the Internet, if you were to take everything that’s proposed on board it would be less like finding ways to improve your classroom effectiveness and more like joining a cult.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m always suspicious of anyone who claims to have “a system” that’s guaranteed to achieve a particular outcome. I’m much more in favour of teachers looking at different ideas and judging which are likely to work most effectively in their particular classroom. Which, in my usual roundabout way, is how to introduce the idea of pivotal moments and hinge questions.

What?

A hinge question is one you use at particular points in a lesson to determine what happens next.

Do you need to review or, worst-case scenario, reteach what you’ve just taught because no-one actually seems to understand it? Or can you continue to the next part of the lesson safe in the knowledge that everyone has a perfect understanding of whatever it was you were teaching?

While things in the actuality will invariably be more-complex than this, the basic idea is that you can use a hinge question as a way of checking the extent to which students have understood something important at particular junctures in a lesson.

A hinge question, in this respect is a question asked simultaneously of the whole class. For the sake of clarity and brevity, it should always be multiple-choice and will ideally have four possible answers:

• One answer is correct…
• The remaining answers should represent common confusions or misrepresentations of the correct answer.

How the class proceeds hinges on the answers given by your students.

Why?

Hinge questions are a way of asking (pre-prepared) questions that help you, as a teacher, see exactly how individual students in a class have understood – or not – what’s just been taught. They’re also diagnostic because you get immediate, direct, feedback on things like:

• which students have / haven’t understood something.
• where common misunderstandings have occurred
• what you need to do in the next part of the lesson (such as reteach something that’s been widely misunderstood or build on your students understanding).

Hinge questions are more useful than traditional ways of eliciting student understanding such as asking them to volunteer answers to a question (only the confident volunteer) or cold-calling, which avoids the volunteer problem, but means you really need to question every student in the class individually – a problem solved by hinge questions because you’re asking every student in the class to answer the same question.

Hinge questions, therefore, are based on the idea that a teaching session – whether you’re using whole class or small-group organisation – involves a series of linked segments whereby you introduce and explain one idea before moving on to the next, related, idea. This creates certain pivot points in a lesson where, ideally, it would be helpful to know your students have understood the ideas you’ve just taught before moving on to the next set.

How?

You need to identify in advance of a class the pivot points at which you want to ask a hinge question. If possible, it’s a good idea to start by identifying points in the lesson where you know students have struggled to understand a key idea in the past and target those pivot points. It’s probably a good idea to start by using a single question in a session until everyone’s got used to the mechanics of questioning. It also means that you only need to prepare one or two questions in advance and these should be:

• Multiple-choice.
• Constructed to include distraction questions that relate to common misconceptions in whatever you’re testing.
• Quick to answer – typically around a minute or two, depending on class size.
• Quick to interpret – you can see within a minute or two things like the number of students who have answered correctly or the number of students who have fallen for a common misconception.

Since it’s often easier to understand abstract ideas by using a concrete example, the following is a multiple-choice hinge question on primary and secondary socialisation:

Once you’ve reached the point in your teaching where you want to apply the hinge question you need to decide how you’re going to collect student responses and this will depend on your preferences and the level of technology you’re using in the class. Old-school tech might include using something like a mini-whiteboard given to each student on which to write and display their answers while with apps like Plickers or Mentimeter students can answer using their phones and their responses can be immediately displayed, in the case of the latter, in a PowerPoint Presentation.

Once you’ve collated all the data from your students’ answers you can use it to make a pivotal decision about how to proceed with the class along the lines of:

• Most answers correct: move-on to need segment.
• Mix of correct / incorrect answers: use small-group and / or pair discussions (e.g. pair those who got the answer right with those who didn’t) to ensure most students have understood the concept being tested before moving-on.
• Most answers incorrect: re-teach the concept focusing on the most common misconceptions and, if necessary re-test the students using a pre-prepared variation of the original multiple-choice question.

This, of course, is just a simple overview of what hinge questions are and how you might want to use them in your classroom and it’s probably a good idea to trial their use a few times to see what does and doesn’t work for you and your students.