Costa Level 2 Questions Examples

Costa'south Levels of Questioning

Costa'south Levels of Questioning — designed by educational researcher Art Costa — characteristic three tiers of questioning designed to promote higher-level thinking and inquiry.

Similar to Bloom's taxonomy, Costa's lower level prompts students to utilise more bones faculties; every bit students motility up in levels, the questions prompt them to use more than complex thinking skills. Through decades of inquiry on human resilience, Dr. Costa besides identified the xvi Habits of Mind, a set of behaviors that support students in navigating the challenges that oft occur in school and life, in general. Several of Dr. Costa's 16 habits — thinking interdependently, innovating, gathering data, and applying by noesis to new situations — both require and reinforce higher levels of questioning.

At that place is a substantive amount of enquiry that supports Dr. Costa'south schema. Newmann (1993) found that higher-order thinking compels students to "manipulate data and ideas in ways that transform their pregnant," and "expects students to solve problems and develop meaning for themselves," which aligns with a constructivist view of instruction.

Costa's Levels of Questioning are typically illustrated using the metaphor of a house with three floors:

Level 1: Gathering

Level 1 questions mainly require students to work with data 'on the page.' Answers to level 1 questions are typically literal; meaning, a educatee tin literally signal to the answer on a page.

We've previously written about Bloom'due south Taxonomy power verbs, and so y'all can predict that Costa's levels take their ain prepare of power verbs, as well. Here are a few that you might find at the outset of Level one questions:

Define
Describe
Memorize
Characterization
Identify
Listing
Observe
Restate
Rewrite
Repeat
Proper name
State
Recall
Recite
Locate
Select
Match
Show

Level 1 questions by content surface area might look like these examples:

Science: Label the parts of an beast cell.
Math: Recite the formula for finding the volume of a cylinder.
Social Studies: Match the proper name of the monarch to their respective country.
English Language Arts: Locate the identify in the plot where the climax occurs.

You can meet how most of these Level 1 ability verbs crave students to recall data, which is an important skill in its own right. All the same, teachers should strive for the majority of their questions to fall in Level 2 or three, which challenge students to employ higher-guild thinking skills.

Level 2: Processing

Level two questions become a step further than Level 1, prompting students to process information by 'reading between the lines.' While students may need to utilize literal information to codify their responses, Level ii requires them to process that information with what they already know in order to brand new connections.

Here are some examples of Level 2 power verbs:

Compare
Contrast
Classify
Sort
Distinguish
Infer
Analyze
Separate
Discriminate
Combine
Assemble
Organize
Suppose

Level 2 questions by content area might prove up in the following ways:

Science: Compare the processes of mitosis and meiosis.
Math: Classify the geometric shapes according to their number of sides and angles.
Social Studies: Gather the following historical events in the order of significance, from most to least.
English language Arts: Analyze the touch that the author's tone has on the overall meaning of the text.

Can you see how Level 2 questions become a pace further than Level i? More than simply regurgitating information, learners accept it and 'do something' with it. They categorize, make distinctions, and compare/contrast it against another office to see how it affects the whole. These kinds of skills can stimulate curiosity and build a span to the questions that really generate creativity and higher-level thinking.

Level 3: Applying

While Level 1 questions prompt students to work with input, and Level 2 questions claiming them to process that input in order to brand new connections. Here, students engage in the highest-level thinking skills to create an output. This could result from making evaluations and analyses, testing solutions to various issues, or making predictions.

We've included some examples of Level 3 power verbs below:

Evaluate
Generalize
Construct
Imagine
Decide
Create
Judge
Analyze
Forecast
If/then
Predict
Rate
Justify
Speculate
Synthesize
Build
Hypothesize

Level iii questions by content area might look like the following:

Scientific discipline: Based on data from the concluding decade of hurricane activity in the southeast U.S., predict how the frequency of hurricane activity will change in the side by side 10 years.
Math: Rate the probability of a presidential candidate winning the election based on securing the balloter votes from the following U.South. states: Florida, California, Virginia, New York, Illinois.
Social Studies: Create a social compact that considers the furnishings of globalization and technological advancement in the 21st century.
English Language Arts: Build an argument that defends or refutes mandatory employee vaccination policies in the United States.

Whether planning for give-and-take-based activities, project-based learning, or contained enquiry, teachers should strive to orient the majority of student thinking and date at Levels ii and 3. Assessments that prompt students to call back bones facts (such as the date of a historical event, or the proper noun of an author, or the formula for an equation) don't really assess students' power to employ new skills or information to new contexts. A Level ii or 3 question would challenge students to make connections with basic data. For example, instead of recalling a mere date, a more open-concluded question would inquire students to predict, based on the fourth dimension in history that a particular event occurred, the likelihood of it recurring, given a similar sociopolitical atmosphere. Forth the aforementioned lines, rather than recalling the names of famous authors, a teacher might claiming students to make an statement for how an author would write virtually a item modern effect.

In "A Talk to Teachers," James Baldwin described the paradox of education: "As one begins to become conscious, ane begins to examine the society in which [they] are educated." Level 2 (and mainly, level 3) questions aim to foster this kind of reaction in students, to cause them to tilt their heads, do double-takes, point out discrepancies, disrupt the condition quo, identify flaws in current institutions, and create innovative solutions for those flaws. These are the questions that inspire us to come up up with more than questions, to think about our thinking, and to evolve — both as individuals and societies.