Exploring Secondary Students’ Questioning Behaviour and Skills: A Needs Analysis for Formative Assessment Development in Indonesia

Students’ questions reveal how they are constructing knowledge, yet secondary students ask few questions in class, and this is commonly attributed to a lack of teacher-provided opportunity or to students’ fear. Little is known about how secondary students themselves account for their questioning, and formative assessment instruments for questioning seldom start from such accounts. This exploratory study, the needs analysis phase of a design-based project, examined Indonesian secondary students’ self-reported questioning to inform a formative assessment instrument for questioning skills. Fifty-two students in grades 7–12, recruited online through non-probability convenience sampling, completed a researcher-developed questionnaire (four closed and three open items) that had not undergone expert validation or pilot testing. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation, double coding of question depth, and thematic analysis. Although 90.4% of students reported that teachers frequently invite questions and 90.4% reported feeling comfortable asking, only 40.4% reported asking often; all measures were self-reported, and classroom behaviour was not observed. All 14 students who rarely asked reported frequent opportunities. Only 25.0% of the recalled example questions sought an explanation or a reason, and one third of students did not provide a formulated question, a result that may partly reflect recall difficulty. Students’ suggestions largely repeated teacher-led question-and-answer. The findings tentatively suggest that permission alone is insufficient and that students may need stimuli that provoke curiosity and support in formulating questions. Five design principles are proposed to guide instrument development; their effectiveness has yet to be evaluated, and the small, self-selected sample limits generalisation.