Unveiling student understanding: The role of the questioning in instruction

We next reexamine the content of questions posed in the previous section. The first question in example 1 is stated in a closed form. At the outset it has the potential to determine the number of people who claim understanding of a piece of mathematics. The same is true for the first question in example 2, stated in closed form. The contrasting questions in each example, however, ask students to analyze and evaluate various methods.