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Table 5 Types of questions (adapted from Chin & Osborne, 2010) asked by students (oral and written forms)

From: Promoting productive argumentation through students' questions

Question types and Concepts Addressed

Examples of Questions

Key inquiry: Sought to explain or addresses big fundamental ideas related to the cause of death

 Heart structures

What role does the septic defect had on her death?

Why is cardiac muscle death only located at the left ventricle?

 Bubble

How did the bubble get into the bloodstream and travel to the coronary artery?

 Water in lungs

Why did water flow into the lungs?

 Pressure differences

How do pressure differences explain for direction of water flow?

Basic information: Factual information students needed to know before they could answer question on key inquiry and hypothesis.

 Lysis of red blood cells

Is osmosis the cause of red blood cells lysis?

What caused the red blood cells to agglutinate?

 Hormones

What is the function of oestrogen?

What is anti-androgen?

 Gender identity

Is he born a male?

What does XY implies?

 Blockage of blood vessel

What could block the coronary artery?

Unknown/missing information: Any information required to determine cause of death but was not given.

 Intravenous injection

Was the injection voluntary?

 Blockage of blood vessel

Is she a smoker since smoking can damage heart and coronary artery?

Hypothesis: Suggested alternatives by showing attempts to make educated guess or informed predication of possibilities

 Intravenous injection

What if someone deliberately injected bubbles into her?

What if she was killed by intravenous injection and then later dumped in the river?

 Water in lungs

What if she was drowned?

 Potassium ions in blood

Could the high level of potassium ions be due to cardiac muscle death instead of lysis of red blood cells?

Others: Miscellaneous questions that do not fall into the above categories

 Structure of argument

Is this under warrant or backing?

 Relevance

Which evidence is relevant for this?

 Validity

Are you sure this reason is valid?

  1. Note: Questions above were sampled from across all the six groups from their oral discourse and written artefacts