This case study explores changes in upper elementary students’ questions and student agency in literacy through questioning sequence-based literary reading. With the recent digital transformation and the development of artificial intelligence, learn...
This case study explores changes in upper elementary students’ questions and student agency in literacy through questioning sequence-based literary reading. With the recent digital transformation and the development of artificial intelligence, learners’ ability to generate their own questions and expand their thinking has become increasingly important. Accordingly, the need for reading instruction centered on students’ questions has been further emphasized. In particular, questioning is closely related to student agency, as it serves as a key mechanism for organizing learners’ thinking and facilitating meaning construction. However, previous studies on student-generated questions have tended to focus mainly on question types or learning effects. Therefore, this study focused on the process through which students generated and selected questions and expanded and revised them through interaction.
The study was conducted with 13 fifth- and sixth-grade students at D Elementary School in Se-jong Special Self-Governing City over eight class sessions in January 2026. The questioning sequence-based literary reading instruction was designed to help students generate and expand their questions according to the stages of detail, category, elaboration, and evidence questions. Data were collected from pre- and post-question activity sheets, student agency questionnaires, classroom transcripts, teacher observation journals, and student artifacts. This study focused on interpreting the process of change in students’ questions and student agency, while the number and types of pre- and post-questions and the results of the student agency questionnaire were used as supplementary data for the qualitative analysis.
The findings are as follows. First, students’ questions in questioning sequence-based literary reading changed in ways that showed expansion and elaboration during the reading process. In the early stage, students mainly generated questions focused on word meanings or the confirmation of specific information. As the lessons progressed, however, their questions moved toward exploring textual expressions, meanings, structures, and characters’ intentions. Students also shared, selected, expanded, and revised their questions through peer interaction. These changes were also confirmed in the pre- and post-question activity sheets, which showed an increase in the number of questions, a decrease in the proportion of detail questions, and an increase in category and elaboration questions.
Second, student agency in literacy generally improved and appeared in various ways throughout the instructional process. Students examined their own understanding, selected questions for inquiry, and revised their questions and interpretations based on the text and their peers’ responses. In this process, the five elements of student agency—self-perception, intentionality, choice-making, persistence, and interactiveness—were manifested in the classroom context.
These findings indicate that, in questioning sequence-based literary reading instruction, students’ questions changed in terms of quantity, type, and content, and that student agency in literacy was concretely manifested through the processes of question generation and interaction. This study is significant in that it applied a questioning sequence to learners’ question-generation processes and analyzed changes in both students’ questions and student agency from a process-oriented perspective. It also suggests that questioning sequence-based literary reading instruction can be used as an instructional approach that supports quantitative and qualitative changes in learners’ questions, as well as the manifestation and development of student agency.
Keywords: Student Agency in Literacy, Questioning sequence-based literary reading, Student-generated questions, Reading education, Upper elementary students, qualitative case study