Brief responses can provide some insight on students’ thinking, but prompts that encourage relevant, elaborate responses paint more complete pictures of student conceptual frameworks. More expansive answers not only provide more student input regarding the specifics of a particular scenario/relationship, they may also reveal more general thoughts that provide insights on how students approach the underlying ideas. Formulating such a prompt can be as simple as adding a ”why“ question to a yes/no question.
Open-ended prompts also tend to encourage expansive answers if they invite students to express connections among pieces of knowledge rather than the pieces of knowledge in isolation:
”What do plants use energy for? Where does that energy come from?“ will more likely yield expansive answers than ”What are the products of photosynthesis? What does the sun provide to plants?“
Note that the use of some elicitation strategies (particularly multiple choice questions) can limit this element in the absence of accompanying interviews.