An Investigation of Questions in McGuffey's Second Eclectic Readers.

In this study, we examined why McGuffey used questions, and found that he believed that the use of questions during instruction would ensure that students understood the lesson. We also examined the type and level of questions in three of his Second Eclectic Readers. We found that the majority (1,218) were wh- questions, while 265 were yes-no and 27 were of other types. Classification systems by Bloom and by Pearson and Johnson were used to classify questions by levels. Overall, we found more questions classified at the knowledge and textually explicit levels than at any other level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]