"If the textbook contains the answers, then what are the questions?(Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p.125)"

It has been my experience that most textbook mainly contain facts and figures. Chapters are filled with data and information and then the end of the chapter contains questions for the students to answer. At times, the students can go back to a place in the chapter and copy the answer to the end-of-chapter question, word-for-word. The questions are designed to only ask for the information given. So, was the question designed to reflect the data or was the data given so that the question could be answered in a certain way? Either way, this type of one-feeds-the-other method of giving and testing information cognizance isn't really helping our students to think on their own and relate information to their own curiosity and experience. According to both Vygotsky and Piaget, students have a need to relate new information to their schema in order to adopt the information and be able to reflect on it later. The relevance of the information to their lives is important. Curiosity is heightened when the student is interested in the subject matter and understanding is heightened when the student has a personal connection (through curiosity) to the information presented or made available.
If the questions “in the back of the chapter” aren't testing the student understanding, then what questions should we be asking? The text Understanding By Design by Wiggins and McTighe, describes the best questions as Essential Questions (p.105-125). Essential Questions are defined as those that “push us to the heart of things” (p.107). We want to ask questions that provoke students to think about the ”why” and “how” instead of just the “what.” Teachers are in the business of stretching students to think instead of just repeat. The questions that we want to ask won't necessarily be answered by a sentence or paragraph in the textbook. We want to ask essential questions such as: “what is the value of...?”, “what was the reason for...?”, “when we compare x to y, what are similarities? The differences?”, “how does this relate to us today?” We want to ask questions that aren't answered in the textbook. We want to ask questions that are answered by our students' creative and analytical minds. In this way, they will learn to stretch their thinking and their imaginations to answer questions that have no one right answer. They will learn that some facts and figures are important to know to prove your thinking, but that the thinking and analysis with the goal of an original understanding is better than a textbook answer.