November 16, 2025 | Updated November 15, 2025
What is the definition of a “good question”?
We often say to each other, “That’s a good question,” by which we usually mean, “I don’t know the answer,” or “I haven’t thought to ask it yet, but it seems worth asking.”
We can begin to define a good question by looking at its opposite. A question can be “bad” for a number of reasons. The question is only a strategy (to inquire) and therefore must have a purpose or intention if we are to assess its quality.
(I was wondering about The purpose of the question I previously included in ours A Guide to Asking Questions in the Classroom).
There must be some kind bare.
So generally speaking, a question can be said to be “bad” if it or doesn’t goal or intention or fails to achieve that goal or intent (while failing to produce some other effect that is undesirable but still somehow positive).
A bad question can be said to be one if it is irrelevant, imprecise or uses vague language.
A bad question will hide rather than reveal what the student knows now.
Also, a bad question will discourage rather than encourage—or enable and encourage—a student to create new knowledge.
A question can be considered poor if it, used in formative assessment, does not provide useful data (formal or informal) that the teacher can use to revise planned instruction.
So posed, a bad question stalls both teacher and student, with no clear and practical way forward.
A bad question scares, confuses (though not all confusion is bad), or somehow evokes a jarring emotion that makes students able to use their cortex as effectively as they would in a more relaxed state.
It may be based on faulty premises, may be loaded with cognitive biases, logical fallacies, or other irrational thought patterns.
It may be outside the Zone of Proximal Development for the person being asked (ie, too easy or too difficult).
It may not be too difficult (from a content knowledge perspective), but its language or syntax may be unnecessarily complex. The result here is that the student gets the question “wrong” even though he “knew the content.”
As we have made clear, the question is simply a learning strategy. A tool. Then you might think of a “bad question” as a “bad tool”: it just doesn’t do what it’s designed to do.
In education, this usually means that it fails to facilitate/encourage learning in the short and/or long term for the student.
A good question, of course, is different. While (mostly) ignoring the nuance of the concept of qualitythere are some things that we might consider to generally qualify a question as a good one (note the intentionally vague language –some things…can think…generally meet the requirements).
A good question – on a test, for example – will be effective and precise in terms of its purpose. If a particular academic standard the teacher wants to assess the student’s mastery of, the question should be written in a way that does just that: assesses mastery of that particular standard.
As we have discussed, there will be no “fat” – unnecessary words, overly complex vocabulary or requiring other (unnecessary, unrelated or not yet learned) knowledge or skills. Of course, a question can have such language and require knowledge or skills unrelated to the particular standard being assessed, provided the teacher understands this—and therefore understands that the student may get the question “wrong” while potentially still mastering the standard.
you see It’s complicated.
Traditional education has long believed that we should help students learn, and that they can best demonstrate that they are learning by answering questions correctly. But answering questions accurately cannot be the goal of education, only a strategy to pursue a larger goal.
Then the simplest criterion for evaluating the quality of a question might be this: a good question helps students learn and learn how to learn in a sustainable, inquiry-based, student-led way. In its best carnations, the bad question is centered as a kind of academic bar for the student to jump over to prove himself.
At worst, a bad question stops the learning process entirely through confusion, inaccuracy and discouragement, misleading both teacher and student as they work their way through the learning process. (See also What is Cognitive Load Theory?)
