5.1 About questions

The final item to score in the opening is the number of questions that the teacher asked the parent– directly or indirectly. Gathering information is another key conference element for Walker and Legg (2018) with stronger performance characterized by asking questions and weaker performance by the failure to ask questions. Note that questions are counted across the whole opening.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

• We are calling this item questions, but really we mean “gathering information from the parent about the child and home.” We don’t score or care about social pleasantry questions (don’t you think the weather is great today? how are you?) or questions that don’t require a response from the parent (so that’s cool, right? yeah she reads a lot, okay?).
• We do care about indirect questions though as long as they are CLEAR attempts to get information from parents. Don’t worry about having to read too much into what teachers said– we want the obvious!
• You might score the same exact teacher statement for purpose and for questions! That’s okay 🙂