“Now, let us move to our conversation — please name characteristics of a parable”. On questions students are asked during their high school oral leaving exam in Polish
In the article I present the results of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 149 questions asked by teachers during 30 high school oral leaving exams in Polish. In this I use the classification formulated by Elizabeth Perrott, who, taking into account Benjamin Bloom’s “taxonomy of educational objectives”, has proposed a division of the questions by the type of thinking process launched during answering, distinguishing lower-level questions recall, understanding, application and higher-level questions analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
The article consists of two main parts. In part one I present the category of question from pragmatic, grammatical and didactic perspectives; in part two I discuss the results of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the question, which unequivocally demonstrates that examiners overuse lower-level questions over 70 percent in the studied material.