Asking meaningful questions in digital outdoor learning tool - a way to support conceptual change

When teaching about complex phenomena (e.g. concepts related to the natural environment), good quality questioning could lead to a more profound conceptual change. However, asking questions that help students to construct new knowledge is a challenge for many educators. To help promote better questioning, we analyzed the kind of questions (N = 3168) educators used in “trails” in a digital outdoor learning tool “Discovery Trail” designed for supporting the environmental education field. For analysis we used a model distinguishing cognitively lower-order from higher-order open-ended questions and then categorized the higher order questions by their degree of complexity. Results show that trails created for educational purposes have more cognitively complex questions compared to non-educational trails. Still, only 20% of all the questions used in trails with educational purposes were cognitively complex. Moreover, 60% of all educational trails did not have any cognitively complex open-ended questions, indicating that educators tend not to use the tool for supporting conceptual change. Simple recall questions were mainly used through educational trails. Digital outdoor learning tool creators and users could benefit by considering how to more effectively construct questions that promote conceptual change as this is crucial to support the understanding about complex environmental topics.