Abstract
The purpose of this research is to identify trends in question types used at different stages of inquiry activities in Japanese primary school science textbooks. This purpose was established to present a perspective for lesson studies. Therefore, ‘questions’ written in the primary school science textbook were extracted to build a data set, following which the types and stages of questions were cross tabulated, and the results considered. The following trends were identified as findings of this research: (1) many questions are set at the ‘background’, ‘problem’, ‘result’, and ‘implication’ stages of the problem solving process, (2) many ‘what kind of’ and ‘how’ questions are used, particularly in the content area of ‘life’, (3) yes-no questions are frequently used in the content area of ‘particles’, (4) questions set at the ‘method’ stage are mainly used in grade 5. Several suggestions for the adequate selection of questions, according to content area and stage, were obtained from the analyses.
