Research shows that young children ask a multitude of why and how questions. And when they do, they're not simply trying to get adult attention; instead, they're actively seeking information. In this article, Paul Harris describes the findings of a number of research analyses based on extensive transcripts of children's natural speech. Some of the research has shown the amazing number of questions that children typically ask at home (an average of 25 questions per hour, according to one study). Other research has observed how children typically respond to adults' answers; when they receive an unsatisfactory answer, children in middle-class families are more likely than those in lower-class families to generate an answer for themselves. Studies that compared children's questions at home and at school have found that children behave quite differently in the two settings; they ask many more questions at home, and are more likely to ask a series of interconnected questions probing the same topic. Yet another study found that teachers believed they asked fewer questions than they actually did--until they reviewed the tapes of their lessons and found that they asked 30 times as many questions as their students did. Harris concludes that if teachers become more aware of questioning patterns in their classrooms, they would be able to create conditions that encouraged more student questions.