The Benefits of Asking Why

This week’s article summary One Key Question May Help Children Get Deeper Meaning from Stories.

If you’re a parent, you most likely recall how your young child would constantly pester you with why questions until you ended the conversation with the definitive ‘Because I said so, that’s why!’

Well, little did you realize but your child by asking why questions was getting you to think more deeply than you probably wanted to: (I sort of know why the sky is blue—something about reflection of water molecules in the atmosphere—but I really just wanted my kids to note the color of the sky, not to give them a science lesson.)

The article below explains that when we ask kids why questions as we read them a book we are helping them think more broadly and deeply and about the moral/theme of a story.

As the article attests, kids by nature love being read to but often need guidance and help thinking beyond the surface understanding of a story.

By asking why, we are actively engaging them in thinking beyond basic plot.

You can think of this article as an example of why we all learn best with teachers/mentors who know more than we do. They help guide us to think and learn beyond what we might otherwise naturally do.

So now it’s our time to turn the tables and be the one who continually asks why.

Joe

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Why? Research finds that asking that simple question can help young students get a lot more out of stories that are read to them.

Teachers have been using stories to convey moral lessons to children since ancient times. But previous research has shown that a story's moral, while obvious to adults, is often missed by early learners who are more likely to focus on a story's surface details.

Simply asking children "why" questions about a story can help them to pick up the story's overarching theme, or moral.

What we've learned from developmental psychology over the years is that a lot of what children fail to do seems not to be a failure of cognitive competence but just a difference in where they're attending, and so by redirecting their attention to different types of information you can get them to do a surprising amount of things that we didn't think that they could do.

Prompting children for a 'why' question is going to lead them to consider hypotheses about the world that they might not otherwise do spontaneously. It leads them to understand what it is that you're looking for and what kinds of features in the story that they should be attending to that they don't do on their own.

Young children already have a keen sense of what makes a good explanation. They tend to focus on things that are simple and broad, and that leads them to discover the moral of the story.

Rather than treating children as passive consumers of the information you're providing them, really getting them actively engaged in that process and asking why questions is a particularly good way of doing that.