Portuguese higher education institutions are going through a challenging process attempting to achieve the move from a teacher-oriented approach to a student-focused approach (Veiga & Amaral, 2009). Scholarship in teaching and learning argues that an emphasis on a learner-centred vision of university teaching demands that student's academic autonomy be the outcome of well-planned educational experiences to help all students develop as independent (Biggs, 1999) and critical thinkers (Ironside, 2003). According to Chin & Osborne (2008), a key feature of academic scientific discourse is the role of questioning in eliciting explanations, postulating theories, justifying reasoning and clarifying doubts. Thus, the act of questioning encourages learners to engage in critical reasoning. Given that asking questions is fundamental to science and scientific inquiry, the development of students’ abilities to ask questions, reason, problem-solve, and think critically should, therefore, become a central focus of current reforms of science education. Students’ questions result form a gap or discrepancy in the students’ knowledge or a desire to extend their knowledge in some direction. Students’ questions may be triggered by unknown words or inconsistencies between their knowledge and new information, which then engenders ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Festinger, 1957), ‘epistemic hunger’ (Berlyne, 1954) or ‘cognitive disequilibrium’ (Graesser & Olde, 2003). According to Graesser & Olde (2003, p.525), ‘questions are asked when individuals are confronted with obstacles to goals, anomalous events, contradictions, discrepancies, salient contrasts, obvious gaps in knowledge, expectation violations, and decisions that require discrimination among equally attractive alternatives’. The same authors have developed a study where college students were asked to raise questions about malfunctioning devices. After reading about a device, the participants received scenarios in which the devices break down and they generated questions about the malfunction. Graesser & Olde (2003) concluded that participants who have a deep understanding of the device asked ‘good questions’ (p.524). Here we are concerned with the different kinds of questions raised by undergraduate science students with different learning styles when approaching chemistry problem-based cases with an experimental focus. Two problem-based cases (‘Sugar ball’ and ‘Mercury heart’) were conceived and designed by the chemistry teacher. These problematic situations were then presented to students who would discuss them in group, and ask questions for answers that assist them in explaining the problem-based cases. This paper reports part of a series of explorations on students’ questions, generated within the learning and teaching of undergraduate chemistry, at the University of Aveiro, Portugal (Pedrosa de Jesus, et al, 2003; Teixeira-Dias et al, 2005).

This paper focuses on nine science undergraduates who were first organised in three groups, each group with three students with the same learning style. Each group was confronted with the same problem-based case (‘The sugar ball’). Second, the nine students formed a single group with a mixture of learning styles, and were confronted with a new problem-based case (‘The mercury heart’). In both situations students were asked to ‘think aloud’ and to write the questions they raised when approaching and discussing the problem. Students’ oral and written questions were collected, and students’ learning styles were identified through Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory (Kolb, 1999) and semi-structured interviews. Audio and video recordings were also used when the students were discussing the problem-based cases.

This study shows that, when approaching problem-based cases, students with different learning styles ask different kinds of questions, confirming the results found in other circumstances, namely, during classes (Pedrosa de Jesus et al, 2006) and during the development of mini-projects (Almeida, Pedrosa de Jesus & Watts, 2008). The results also demonstrate that their questioning patterns exhibited through the semester were also seen during the group discussion of the problem-based cases, and this allows us to say that these students had a relatively stable questioning style. It is also important to notice that problem-based cases did not produce higher level questions (integration questions), which seems to confirm those questions resulting from students’ genuine reflection, and are not instigated through external factors, tend to have a higher cognitive level (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1992).