A complementary questioning method to the Socratic Method: for Advanced Management Accounting students

A complementary questioning method to the Socratic Method: for Advanced Management Accounting students

 

The Socratic Method is a very useful method for my part-time Advanced Management Accounting students to employ to support their intellectual learning with regard to doing course assignment, literature review and refining assignment discussion proposal. Could you suggest another questioning method that is also good to use for these activities?

A strong complement to the Socratic Method is higher-order questioning based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. While Socratic questioning challenges assumptions and logic through dialogue, Bloom-based questioning gives students a systematic ladder for moving from description to analysis, evaluation, and original argument—exactly what they need for assignments, literature reviews, and research proposals.

Why it suits your course

Bloom’s Taxonomy classifies cognitive work into six levels: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating. The higher levels—analyse, evaluate, and create—are especially useful for developing critical thinking and well-justified academic arguments.

For Advanced Management Accounting, this method helps students avoid merely reporting theories or cases. It pushes them to compare frameworks, assess evidence, identify practical implications, and formulate a defensible assignment position.

How to use it

Ask students to apply these question stems at each stage of their work:

Stage	Question type	Examples for management accounting
Literature review	Understand / Analyse	“What are the key assumptions of balanced scorecard research?” “How do these authors define strategic performance measurement?”
Comparing sources	Analyse / Evaluate	“Which study offers stronger evidence, and why?” “Are the findings transferable to Hong Kong SMEs?”
Assignment argument	Evaluate	“Does activity-based costing improve decision quality, or only cost visibility?” “What are the limitations of the proposed solution?”
Proposal refinement	Create	“What original contribution can my study make?” “How can I combine theory, context, and method into a coherent research design?”

Higher-order questions commonly use prompts such as “explain,” “compare,” “why,” “which solution is best and why,” and “do you agree or disagree?”; these encourage students to reason rather than recall.

A practical student routine

Students can use a three-question refinement cycle:

1.    What exactly am I claiming?
“My proposed assignment argues that digital management accounting tools improve cost-control decision-making in SMEs.”

2.    What evidence and theory support it?
“Which literature, cases, or data support this claim? What counter-evidence exists?”

3.    What is the next best version of the claim?
“Should I narrow it to a particular industry, firm size, technology, or decision context?”

This cycle prevents vague topics such as “AI in management accounting” and helps convert them into focused proposals, such as: “How do AI-enabled budgeting tools affect managerial decision quality in Hong Kong retail SMEs?”

How it complements Socratic questioning

Dimension	Socratic Method	Bloom-based questioning
Main purpose	Probe assumptions, logic, and implications through dialogue	Structure thinking from basic understanding to original synthesis
Best use	Challenging a student’s argument in class or supervision	Planning, drafting, and self-checking written work
Student benefit	Learns to defend and revise reasoning	Learns to organise research and assignment development systematically
Example	“What assumption underlies your claim?”	“What evidence would allow you to evaluate that claim?”

Socratic questioning is particularly effective for probing the meaning, justification, evidence, perspectives, and consequences of a claim; Bloom-based questioning then helps students convert those insights into a structured written argument or research design.

Suggested classroom prompt

Ask each student to bring one draft research proposition and answer:

• Remember/Understand: What are the main concepts and theories involved?
• Apply: How would this theory apply to a real management accounting problem?
• Analyse: What are the relationships, tensions, or gaps in the literature?
• Evaluate: Which argument is most convincing, and on what criteria?
• Create: What refined research question, conceptual framework, or assignment conclusion follows?

This gives your part-time students a repeatable intellectual discipline: they can use Socratic questioning to test their ideas in discussion, then use Bloom-based questioning to develop those ideas into rigorous assignments and proposals

 

Provide 3 relevant academic references on the topic here in Harvard reference format.

Here are three relevant academic references in Harvard referencing style, covering Bloom’s revised taxonomy, Socratic questioning, and the use of questioning to develop higher-order thinking.

1.    Anderson, L.W. and Krathwohl, D.R. (eds.) (2001) A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

2.    Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2007) ‘Critical thinking: The art of Socratic questioning’, Journal of Developmental Education, 31(1), pp. 34–37. 

3.    Lemons, P.P. and Lemons, J.D. (2013) ‘Questions for assessing higher-order cognitive skills: It’s not just Bloom’s’, CBE—Life Sciences Education, 12(1), pp. 47–58. doi:10.1187/cbe.12-03-0024. 

These sources would support a discussion of how Bloom-based questioning can complement the Socratic Method in helping students analyse literature, evaluate arguments, and refine assignment or dissertation proposals. Anderson and Krathwohl provide the revised cognitive hierarchy, Paul and Elder explain Socratic questioning as a critical-thinking practice, and Lemons and Lemons examine how questioning can target higher-order cognitive skills.