Preguntas de investigación, de sondeo, para llegar al fondo.

Creo que eso es lo que quieren decir con "anchor".

Aquí tenemos un ejemplo donde usan las palabras "key questions" y "anchor questions" para referirse a las mismas preguntas.
https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publicatio...

Four key questions frame the curriculum, organize students’ developmental journey, and set larger questions that frame student learning in the academies:

1. Who am I? 2. Who are we? 3. What is nature of the world around us? 4. What can we do about it?

Each grade sequentially focuses on one question, and the questions progressively build on one another to foster students’ social emotional and social justice development. In grades 9 and 10, students explore their identity and culture in courses and projects by pursuing the questions, “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” Students examine the third question—“What is the nature of the world around us?”—in 11th 62 Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education Social Emotional Learning in High School grade, when they reflect on the local community and their place in it. The fourth question—“What can we do about it?”—frames students’ 12th grade inquiry and functions as a call to action through individual and collective agency, empowerment, and responsibility both for oneself and one’s community.

The trajectory of these questions—which takes students from self-identity, to community-identity, to critical analysis of the world, to acting for meaningful change—reflects the school’s priorities for social emotional learning and social justice education. Going back to one’s roots, for example, provides opportunities for the development of self- and other-awareness, interdependence, and multicultural literacy; liberation both creates opportunities for and supports the development of social responsibility and community engagement. The structural relationship between Sankofa and Liberation operationalizes El Puente’s belief that the school’s educational journey to justice must begin with the development of self-awareness and knowledge of one’s roots and history.

El Puente’s assistant principal pointed out that this set of anchor questions leads students to think about “how they can remediate some of the issues going on in their lives and the community.”...