Seminar focus: defend a question worth asking
Run a question clinic in which pairs compare weak, leading, and investigable questions. Each speaker must justify a revision using precision, fairness, and answerability rather than personal preference.
- Seminar move: Structured comparison of candidate questions and counterexamples
- Seminar outcome: A defended question revision with criteria-based reasoning
🎯 Learning Intentions
- Understand the difference between a survey question and an investigative question
- Learn the criteria for a good investigative question
- Practise writing summary and comparison questions
🎥 Media Anchor (8 mins)
Video: Research Skills for Students
- How can we rewrite a broad question so it becomes measurable?
- What bias risk appears when a question is leading or vague?
1. Warm Up: Question Sort (10 mins)
Activity: Sort these questions into "Can answer with data" vs "Hard to answer with data":
- "Who is the best rugby player?" (Subjective)
- "How tall are the students in Room 5?" (Measurable)
- "Why is blue the best colour?" (Opinion)
- "What is the most common eye colour in our whānau?" (Countable)
2. Concept: Anatomy of a Question (15 mins)
A good investigative question needs I-V-G:
- Interest: What property are you interested in? (e.g., height, lunch type)
- Variable: What are you measuring? (e.g., centimetres, food category)
- Group: Who are you measuring? (e.g., Year 8 students in Room 5)
Example: "What are the heights (V) of Year 8 students in Room 5 (G)?"
3. Activity: Fix the Question (20 mins)
Task: Turn these bad questions into good investigative questions:
- "Do you like sports?" → "primary sport played by Year 8 students"
- "Are we tall?" → "heights of students in our class compared to..."
- "Is this lunch healthy?" → "sugar content in lunchbox items of..."
4. Investigation Setup (10 mins)
Start thinking about your own investigation project. What are you curious about?
Draft 3 potential investigative questions for your project.
📋 Teacher Planning Snapshot
Ngā Whāinga Ako — Learning Intentions
The class interrogates a set of questions together and rewrites the weakest one until it is investigable.
Ngā Paearu Angitū — Success Criteria
- ✅ I can identify what is wrong with a poorly posed question.
- ✅ I can rewrite a vague question so it names a variable and a comparison.
Differentiation & Inclusion
Scaffold support: A bank of weak questions to critique, so ākonga improve before they compose. Extension: write the strongest question the class's data could support.
ELL / ESOL: Rehearse the critique sentence stems: 'This question does not say what is measured…'
Inclusion: Written critique counts equally with spoken critique.
Mātauranga Māori lens: Iwi environmental monitoring begins from a question the community needs answered. A well-posed question names who the answer is for.
Prior knowledge: Students should have basic familiarity with data displays (bar graphs, dot plots). No prior statistical investigation experience required — the PPDAC inquiry cycle provides accessible scaffolding for first-time investigators.
Curriculum alignment
This lesson develops the Level 4 statistical-investigation objective through a real stage of the PPDAC cycle. See the unit curriculum companion for the exact source statement and lesson-to-evidence map.