Question

What is a fertile question?

The Fertile Question is the pivot around which your whole inquiry rotates. It is important to spend some time drafting a good one. Check out this short video on what a fertile question is.

Here are 7 characteristics of a great fertile question:

Is open-ended. There is no single, final, and correct answer. Questions that can be answered in Yes/No are not compelling questions.
Is thought-provoking and will often spark rich discussion and debate.
Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. Translation: You cannot simply Google the answer!
Addresses important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines and subject areas.
Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry (although is able to be researched given the available time and resources.).
Requires us to support and justification our answer with arguments and evidence.
Inspires us to take action.

Some starters:

“What should be done about….”

“How might we….”

You might want to try completing a Question Grid about your topic to help with your development of your fertile question:

Self assess your question

Here is a tool from Jamie McKenzie that you can use to rate your fertile question’s ‘Degree of Difficulty’:

The table below defines four degrees of difficulty with 4 being the toughest level and 1 being the least challenging.

Rating the Question’s Degree of Difficulty

4 - No one else has ever asked this question before and building an answer will require imaginative thinking and much synthesis of information gathered. Because it is unique there will be no previous work to guide you.

3 - While others have explored this question previously, it has perplexed people for so long it has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Building an answer will require imaginative thinking and much synthesis of information gathered as well as a review of previous attempts.

2 - This question or issue has been explored many times before and already answered but there is disagreement over those answers. All that is required is a review of that past work in order to select the most reasonable and defensible answer.

1 - This question or issue has been explored many times before and already answered to satisfaction. It will require nothing more than paraphrasing and summarizing.

Source: McKenzie, J. (2016, May). Bigger is not better! Retrieved April 30, 2016, from http://fno.org/may2016/notbetter.html

McKenzie also provides a great resource on developing meaningful questions called Question Press.

Mindup – online tool for Mindmapping that can save to your Google drive. Can use for brainstorming topics and ideas.