Current Studies
Curiosity
Children’s motivation to learn plays a crucial mediating role in the ultimate success of any instructional effort, and one important motivator is children’s natural curiosity (Stipek, 2002). In our work on curiosity, we first created an operational definition and measure of children's curiosity by assessing their exploration. Now that we have that, we can study the development of curiosity, and use the measure to explore other related questions. Curiosity and Achievement Motivation. We know that curiosity is a crucial aspect of children’s development and an important part of the learning process. In early education, kindergarten teachers name curiosity as one of the most important characteristics for children’s school readiness, and it is one of the primary “character strengths” emphasized by America’s largest network of charter schools. Yet, children’s curiosity seems to diminish as they progress through formal education. This project investigates the question of why this happens. We think that current classroom practices might promote a type of motivation that is inconsistent with learning for the sake of learning itself, and instead promotes a more competitive and performance based culture. This, in turn, might be hurting children's curiosity. Sign up for our database to receive updates on what we learn from our current studies on this topic! Asking effective questions. Question asking is one way that curiosity can impact learning. Children most likely learn from all different types of questions, but some are more effective than others for gathering information. The questions that are most likely to lead to learning in more formal environments, such as at school, need to be effective for requesting the specific needed information. Unfortunately, children ask few if any questions at school, and they are not typically high-level questions to understand topics more deeply. For example, they may ask what an animal is called and what it eats, rather than why it lives in a specific habitat, or how it is impacted by different environmental factors. In this project, we try to break down the processes involved in asking effective questions and study how these different processes develop and lead to learning. Our future work will aim to develop methods of improving children's ability to ask effective questions. |