Development of training programs and evaluation methods for question intelligence

Asking questions is key to advancing knowledge and asking the creative questions is especially important. Being able to properly frame and focus on the creative questions is an important skill but this isn’t something that is taught or evaluated within educational systems. Professor Fumihito Ikeda, Brain Science Research and Education Center, Institution for the Advancement of Higher Education, Hokkaido University, Japan, believes that nurturing children’s development of creative questioning skills at school would be beneficial for the leaders of tomorrow. He and his team are developing test questions and training programmes for schools that generate questions focused on three types of logical reasoning: inductive, deductive and abductive. Ikeda’s goal is to develop and train mainly primary and high school students in question-intelligence. A test question using the three types of reasoning was created and tried on around 200 high school students. The researchers utilised, a deep neural network (DNN), a form of machine learning, to assist in the automatic classification and evaluation of questions.Ikeda plans to create an inquiry learning programme that will improve the quality of scientific questions while asking different types of logic in order to collect more appropriate questions for DNN to learn. He will use his partnerships with the Japan Society for Science Education and the Japan Creativity Society to roll these programmes out to students at educational institutions.