The ABCs of How We Learn Creating a reason to inquire QUESTION-DRIVEN LEARNING IS undertaken in the service of answering a question, whether yours or someone else’s. Done well, question-driven learning increases curiosity, purpose, attention, and well-connected memories. Complex questions may further boost problem-solving skills and strategies. Question-driven learning starts early in life. An infant drops a bowl of peas from her high chair, waiting to learn what happens next. A young child asks innumerable why questions. Adults search the web for answers to health problems. A criticism of many school environments is that they distort question asking. Ben Stein, in the movie Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, ad-libbed a great sendup of bad classroom instruction: In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the … Anyone? Anyone? … the Great Depression, passed the … Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? … raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. (http://www.filmsite.org/bestspeeches38.html) These rhetorical questions do not help anything. Instead, students (well, maybe not those students) could have been engaged...