  Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly
employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college
classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to
student learning. To encourage students to ask questions, many instructors
initiate open question periods in their lectures with verbal solicitations
(i.e., "Questions?"). Although several university centers for teaching and
learning, such as at UC Berkeley, and instructor reflections suggest that the
scripts of question solicitations impact the frequency of questions returned by
students, no literature exists to support this claim. This quasi-experimental
scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study conducted with the
Students-as-Partners model, observes the effect of a new solicitation script
integrated into an introductory physics lectures to improve question
participation from students. While the new solicitation script did not change
the total number of questions asked by students in comparison to previous
scripts, the number of questions asked by people who likely have gender
identities traditionally underrepresented in physics (i.e. all but cis-men)
increased significantly.
