Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning —
Abstract of

Self-Questioning Taxonomy

Doug Buehl

The Self-Questioning Taxonomy is an instructional strategy that provides students with a framework for generating their own questions as readers of texts across a variety of academic disciplines. Students are mentored to raise questions while reading that progressively take them deeper in comprehending an author's message. The Self-Questioning Taxonomy features questioning prompts based on the revised Bloom's Taxonomy: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. These questions offer students their own cues for monitoring their comprehension and assessing their understanding of a text. As an extension of this strategy, content-specific questions can be developed; for example, students can be prompted to develop questions that reflect the thinking of historians as they read historical texts. An example of content-specific questions—a taxonomy for questioning literary fiction—is provided.

Buehl, D. (2009). Self-Questioning Taxonomy. In Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (pp. 157-161). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.