Questioning
Questioning complements Observation [►Observation ], Professional Discussion [►Professional Discussion ] and Work Product [►Work Product ].
Questions are used to:
- establish a candidate’s Knowledge and Understanding
- clarify something
- find out how they would have dealt with an unforeseen event
There are many types of questions:
| Closed |
Yes/No responses |
| Open |
More than one word answers.Responses to “Why?”, “How?”, “Who?” etc |
| Follow up |
to seek more depth or to confirm competence |
| Hypothetical |
“What ifs?” |
Simply giving candidates a set of written questions covering all of the Knowledge within each Unit is poor practice. Best practice is to show Knowledge from Performance where possible. It is highly unlikely that all Knowledge across an SVQ can be covered by inferring from performance, but Knowledge should as much as possible be linked to the candidate’s performance and therefore expressed in the context of their work.
A good way of doing this is to ask supplementary questions as part of an Observation, Professional Discussion or as a follow-up to Work Product.
Where questioning is used, the questions and candidate’s response must be recorded. It is not sufficient to say “I asked a series of questions and the candidate responded correctly” or list the questions with each ticked off in the style of a checklist.
Generic questions are OK but can be weaker than contextualised ones as they are more susceptible to rote learning and may not provide evidence that the candidate can apply the relevant Knowledge.
Questions are a good way of helping authenticate evidence.
