Asking questions is an important component of promoting inquiry and argumentation in the science classroom. We investigated the relationship between the cognitive depth and format of teacher-generated questions to be used with classroom response technologies. Twelve middle school science teachers were randomly assigned to write either constrained or free-response questions on 4 different topics and to rate the cognitive depth of those questions. Using Bloom's Taxonomy to guide question classification, we found that the teacher-generated, free-response questions were 5.58 times more likely to be at the "understanding" level than at the "remembering" level and 2.05 times more likely to be at the applying level than at the "understanding" level. Our findings provide evidence of a potential barrier to adopting inquiry-based science teaching practices.