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Curiosity and Related Constructs
Curiosity
Despite widespread interest in and acknowledgment of the importance of curiosity, there are substantial gaps in our current understanding of curiosity and how it intersects with intellectual development in childhood. Evidence suggests that curiosity promotes a range of positive outcomes from exploration and persistence in information seeking to academic performance and longer-term well-being (Kashdan & Silvia, 2009; Kashdan & Steger, 2007; von Stumm et al., 2011). Yet, we know very little about curiosity, and we lack an evidence-based theoretical conceptualization of curiosity in children, including how curiosity in educational contexts might shape the ways children think about learning and being learners. What does curiosity in educational settings look like? Is it stable or does it change over time or across subject areas? Does curiosity have differing developmental trajectories across children? How sensitive is it to environmental inputs, such as instruction, and what kinds of instructional practices promote curiosity? More generally, if curiosity is seen as an important virtue in adults, how can we can support its development in children, and how do changes in curiosity influence children’s broader profile of intellectual character virtues? Can curiosity prepare children to be lifelong learners? My research addresses these questions. Measures of curiosity and related constructs. We are currently working on developing measures of curiosity, academic orientations, creativity, open-minded thinking, and intellectual courage. Our goals include investigating whether curiosity is domain general or specific, differences between depth and breadth in information seeking, relations among intellectual virtues and orientations, and how to develop curiosity in children. This requires new measures, and better evaluation of existing measures. We are working on both questionnaire-style tools and direct behavioral measures that can be used with young children. |
curiosity and question asking
Curiosity and Creativity
Creativity is a dynamic and social construct that is often associated with curiosity. Teachers can nurture children’s curiosity and creativity, so in our research we are interested in how the two overlap. Many of our exploration games and tasks are measures of both curiosity and creativity, keeping creativity at the forefront of our research. Curiosity and Intellectual Humility Intellectual humility is a construct that involves (1) recognizing that I may lack information/may be wrong, (2) recognizing that listening to others can help surface our intellectual limitations and blind spots, and (3) a commitment to re-evaluate one’s confidence/beliefs based on the quality of new information. We are interested in how intellectual humility is associated with a child’s curiosity and information seeking behaviors, and are using self-report surveys and other games to do so. Curiosity and Science Identity A student’s science identity refers to their self-perception as a scientist. This includes feelings related to a student’s interest in and enjoyment of science, their own and others’ perceptions of them as a scientist, and their perceived personal usefulness of science. We are interested in how curiosity is related to these feelings. Teachers' instruction of curiosity and motivation. We are interested in teachers' use of instructional language to promote students' curiosity and motivation. We identified specific practices that can support becoming curious and acting on curiosity, and developed a coding framework to measure the frequency of these practices during instruction. We are using this framework to observe instruction throughout a school year, measuring students' curiosity and other character values at several timepoints. |
This line of work has been supported by funds from the John Templeton Foundation, the Jacobs Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Center for curriculum Redesign.
