Question Formulation Technique: The Complete Guide, Steps, and Classroom Example

The question formulation technique, often shortened to QFT, is a process developed by the nonprofit Right Question Institute and first published by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana in their book Make Just One Change. Instead of a teacher asking questions and students answering them, QFT flips the roles: students generate, refine, and prioritize their own questions about a topic, then use those questions to drive research, discussion, or writing.

Every QFT session starts with a Question Focus, usually shortened to QFocus, a prompt written by the teacher that gives students something to react to. A QFocus can be a single statement ("War is inevitable"), an image, a data set, or even one word, but it is never phrased as a question itself. That distinction matters: a QFocus that's already a question gives students something to answer rather than something to question, which defeats the point of the exercise.

From there, students follow four rules while producing questions: ask as many questions as you can, don't stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of them, write down every question exactly as it was said, and change any statement into a question. Those four rules are what separates the question formulation technique from an open brainstorm, they keep the group moving and stop early judgment from shutting down quieter students before the list is even finished.

Most classroom questioning research focuses on the questions a teacher asks. The question formulation technique focuses on something researchers spend a lot less time studying: whether students know how to ask a good question in the first place. Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana developed QFT after noticing that many students, especially those from families less familiar with the education system, never learned this skill directly, it was assumed rather than taught.

The structure does two things most open-ended brainstorms don't. First, it separates producing questions from judging them. Divergent thinking (coming up with as many ideas as possible) and convergent thinking (narrowing them down) are different mental modes, and mixing them slows both down. QFT's four rules keep the group in divergent mode during production, then switch to convergent mode only during the improve and prioritize steps.

Second, it makes question quality visible and teachable. Sorting questions into closed-ended (answerable with a yes, no, or one word) and open-ended (needing explanation) gives students a concrete way to see why one version of a question gets more out of a source than another, instead of being told a question is "too simple" with no way to fix it. Our question matrix guide breaks these categories down further by cognitive level, useful once a class is comfortable with the basic open and closed split.

The Right Question Institute has documented QFT use across subjects from elementary science to graduate-level courses, and it doesn't require new content or curriculum, only a QFocus and about 20 to 40 minutes of class time, which is part of why the technique spread well beyond the classrooms where it started.

A full question formulation technique session runs through six stages in order. Skipping the order, especially jumping to prioritizing before improving, produces a weaker set of questions than working through each stage in sequence. If the priority questions from a QFT session turn into a longer assignment, narrowing them further is covered in our research question generator guide.

A ninth-grade biology class runs a question formulation technique session using the QFocus: "Photosynthesis converts sunlight into stored energy." In five minutes, one group produces this list: Does every plant photosynthesize the same way? What happens to a plant that gets no sunlight? Is stored energy the same as sugar? Why does photosynthesis only happen in green parts of a plant? Can photosynthesis happen at night? How much sunlight does a plant actually need? What would happen to Earth if photosynthesis stopped?

During the improve step, the group labels each question. "Can photosynthesis happen at night?" and "Is stored energy the same as sugar?" get marked closed-ended, they can be answered with a yes, a no, or one word. The rest get marked open-ended, they need an explanation. The group then practices converting one closed question into an open one: "Can photosynthesis happen at night?" becomes "Under what conditions, if any, can a plant convert energy without direct sunlight?", a question that now requires research rather than a single fact.

For the prioritize step, the teacher's task is a short research paper, so the group picks the three questions most likely to sustain that kind of writing: "What happens to a plant that gets no sunlight?", the reworked night-photosynthesis question, and "What would happen to Earth if photosynthesis stopped?" A question like "How much sunlight does a plant actually need?" gets set aside, not because it's a bad question, but because it points toward a single fact rather than a paper's worth of research.

That last distinction, choosing questions for what they can sustain rather than just what sounds interesting, is what separates a strong prioritize step in the question formulation technique from students simply picking their favorite question off the list.

Most question formulation technique sessions that fall flat trace back to one of a handful of repeatable mistakes, not a flaw in the method itself.

Building a strong QFocus usually means pulling one clear prompt out of a much larger source, a chapter, a lecture, a full article, which is slower than the QFT session itself if you're doing it by hand. Notelyn shortens that step by turning raw material into something a QFocus can be built from directly.

Import a reading, a recorded lecture, or a PDF into Notelyn, and its AI summary and key concepts list surface the core statements and claims in the source. Any one of those can work as a QFocus on its own, or as a starting point for writing one. Once a class or study group has produced and improved its questions, Notelyn's mind map feature can group them visually, which makes it easier to see patterns, like several questions circling the same idea, before the prioritize step.

For the questions a student ends up prioritizing, the AI Q&A assistant can check them against the original source before research even starts, confirming which priority questions the material already answers directly and which ones genuinely need outside research. That distinction is exactly what the question formulation technique is designed to produce, and having it confirmed against the source material makes the next steps decision faster.

The question formulation technique takes about half a class period to run once, and most of that time is the students working, not the teacher lecturing. Start small: pick one QFocus for an upcoming reading or unit, run the full six stages in order, and see what the class produces compared to a normal round of teacher-asked questions.

The technique also works outside a classroom. A study group preparing for an exam can use a single sentence from a textbook chapter as a QFocus, produce and improve questions as a group, then split up the priority questions as review topics. It pairs well with active recall studying once the priority questions are chosen, since testing yourself on your own questions works the same way as testing yourself on flashcards.

If the source material is a chapter, a recorded lecture, or a dense PDF, importing it into Notelyn before the session starts can save the time usually spent hunting for a QFocus, so more of the session goes toward the part of the question formulation technique that actually builds the skill: students asking their own questions.