Then the students were directed to the second stage of the exercise: They were instructed to change open questions to closed ones, and vice versa—so that, for example, an open question that began as Why is torture effective? might be changed to a closed one: Is torture effective? The purpose of this part of the exercise, according to Rothstein, is to show that a question can be narrowed down in some cases, or expanded in others. As students do this, he says, they begin to see that “the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.” Next, the students
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