Better questions, better learning

Your students' answers will only ever be as insightful as the questions you ask them. That was the through-line of our recent live session for higher education – and it's worth sitting with for a moment.

Most of us have been in a classroom where the questions did all the wrong things. They asked for recall when we needed reflection. They stuck to the same format until the room went quiet. They assumed everyone was already on the same page. We've been there as students, and many of us have been there as educators too.

The good news: a small shift in how we ask is enough to change what we hear back.

The questions that quietly hold us back

A few patterns come up again and again in lecture halls, and they're worth naming.

Recall-only questions. Useful, but only as a starting point. If we never move past "remember the fact," we never get to the parts of learning that actually stick.

The same format, every time. Multiple choice has its place. So does the word cloud, the open-ended question, the scale, the ranking. Different formats activate different ways of thinking. Mixing them keeps your students' brains awake – and tells you more about what they actually understand.

The curse of knowledge. When we know a topic well, we forget what it felt like to learn it for the first time. The questions get harder than they need to be, the basics get skipped, and students who'd otherwise be curious quietly check out.

None of these are dramatic mistakes. They're the small habits that, over a semester, flatten engagement.

What makes a question brain-friendly

Brain-friendly learning isn't a buzzword. It's just learning that works the way memory and cognition actually work – building on what's already there, connecting to lived experience, and inviting curiosity rather than demanding compliance.

A question earns the "brain-friendly" label when it's:

Clear and simple, but not necessarily easy. The complexity should sit in the thinking, not in decoding what you're asking. If students are spending energy interpreting the question, they have less left for the answer.

Relevant. Connect the concept to a real-life scenario, and you trigger stronger neural pathways and far more engagement. We see this in classroom after classroom.

Varied in format. Different question types pull students into a topic from different angles. The same idea, asked three different ways, gets understood three times over.

Connected to emotion and curiosity. Education isn't only about remembering facts. It's about students being genuinely interested in the thing in front of them.

A few examples to keep in your back pocket:

• "What was your main takeaway from last class?"
• "What connections can you make between last week's material and today's topic?"
• "What's a real-world example of the idea we discussed last time?"

Simple on the surface. Substantial underneath.

Climbing the pyramid: Bloom's taxonomy in practice

Bloom's taxonomy is a familiar friend to most educators – a framework for moving students from remembering facts all the way up to creating new ideas with them. It works because it's systematic. It also works because it gives you a vocabulary for designing questions at each level.

In the session, we walked through all six levels using a deliberately low-stakes example: how to make crepes. Here's the shape of it.

Remember. Verbs: define, repeat, identify. "Which of these ingredients is not part of the recipe?" Recall, plain and simple.

Understand. Verbs: describe, explain, demonstrate. "Describe the process of making a crepe." Now students have to put the steps in their own words.

Apply. Verbs: solve, calculate, predict. "You've run out of butter. How would you solve this without losing flavor?" The answers came in fast – vegetable oil, margarine – and a word cloud showed the room thinking together in real time.

Analyze. Verbs: classify, compare, categorize. "Why are eggs added to the recipe?" Suddenly we're not just following instructions – we're working out why the instructions exist.

Evaluate. Verbs: defend, critique, justify. "Should traditional dishes like crepes stay authentic, or evolve for new generations?" The room split. That's the point. Evaluation surfaces opinions and asks students to stand behind them.

Create. Verbs: design, combine, generate. "Imagine a new version of the crepe. What would you add?" Almond flour. Matcha. Cardamom. Lime curd. Vegan butter. The answers were wild and brilliant – and that's what creation looks like when students feel safe enough to play.

The whole exercise takes about fifteen minutes. By the end, students have moved from passive recall to original thinking, and you have a much richer picture of what they actually know.

The small features that change the dynamic

A few things make this kind of session noticeably better in practice.

Hide responses while students are answering. Press H, or use the toolbar at the bottom. It eliminates the bias of seeing what others have said and forces independent thinking. When you reveal the results, the room genuinely wants to see what comes up.

Let AI categorize open-ended responses. When you ask "what would you add to a new crepe?" and get 80 unique answers, sorting them by hand is a chore. With a tap of the spacebar, Menti groups them into themes – chocolate lovers, spice enthusiasts, alternative-flour experimenters – so you can see the shape of the room instantly. (AI features need to be enabled by your workspace admin, so if you can't see them, check there first.)

Use Menti Creator for the first draft. Feed it your lecture notes as a PDF, tell it what you're trying to assess, and it'll build a session you can edit from. It's a starting point, not a final answer – but it cuts the blank-page problem down to nothing.

Try sending a Menti as a survey. Not every Menti needs to happen live. You can flip a presentation into a self-paced questionnaire and send it as a pre-class assessment, so you walk into the lecture already knowing what your students do and don't understand.

A small invitation

The questions you ask shape the thinking your students do. That's the whole pitch. Pick one habit from this post – try a brain-friendly question, climb a level on Bloom's, hide the responses for the next round – and notice what changes.

If you'd like to bring Mentimeter to your institution, or just talk through how other higher-ed teams are using it, we're around. Find us on LinkedIn or drop us a note at hello@mentimeter.com. We'd love to hear how it goes.

This post is based on a recent Mentimeter webinar with Galina Butsyak, Learning Advisor. Watch the full session here.

We run sessions like this every few weeks – practical, no fluff, built around the questions leaders are actually wrestling with. Come join the next one at mentimeter.com/webinars.