Students’ Curiosity and Culture Context of Four Cities in SSES 2019: two-level hierarchical linear model

• In Event: Education Policy and Reform (I)

Proposal

Social and Emotional Skills has attracted worldwide attention in recent years, which shows the shift of education focus from solely on cognitive abilities to equally on non-cognitive and cognitive abilities. OECD started up the first round of the Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) in 2019, and curiosity was evaluated as one of the fifteen skills. As an important ability to influence individual and social development, curiosity has received wide attention. Curiosity is defined as an interest in ideas and love of learning, understanding and intellectual exploration, and is an inquisitive mind-set in SSES. Curiosity not only inspires individuals to explore unfamiliar and challenging things to promote personal growth, but also leads to higher life satisfaction and positive emotions, which are important for good physical and mental health. Thus, it is quite important to seek for the factors that influence students’ curiosity development, and the feasible ways to develop students’ curiosity. Also, since students are growing up in a different culture, culture places an crucial role in students’ development. The influence of culture on students’ thoughts, feelings and behaviors is hidden in all aspects of education, and has a profound impact on their cognitive and non-cognitive ability acquisition. Thus, the internal similarities and external differences of different countries and cultural circles should be discussed from the perspective of multi-culture. Based on the culture circle, the study compares four cities from two kinds of culture, two from western culture, Ottawa (Canada) and Huston (America), and two from eastern culture Suzhou (China) and Daegu (South Korea),
Since SSES 2019 using step-sampling method, the study chose to use two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) to do the cultural comparison. It will analyze the difference of students’ curiosity in four cities from two cultures, explore the influence of culture on students’ curiosity, and find feasible ways to improve students’ curiosity. The dependent variable of this study is students’ curiosity ability, which score is constituted by questions in SSES 2019. As for independent variable, the study selected two levels of variables, student-level variables include gender, age, socio-economic status, participation in school activities, participation in after school activities, and relationship with peers; and school-level variables includes school belonging, school cooperative atmosphere, Competitive atmosphere, bullying, student-teacher relationship. All the scores of variables are composed of related items. The study did the descriptive statistics analysis to explore the overall level of students’ curiosity ability in five cities firstly. Then, the two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) was used to explore the student-level and school-level factors of curiosity abilities. The null model without any predictor variables was constructed as a benchmark model to test whether there was variation in curiosity ability at the school level. And the full model was constructed by taking into account the predictors of student level and school level.
Based on the result of descriptive statistics analysis and two-level hierarchical linear model analysis, the study explores the difference of curiosity development of four cities and two kinds of culture, and will seek for the ways for government, school, teachers, and parents to develop students’ curiosity.

Author

• CHINA JUAN WANG, EAST CHINA NORMAL UNIVERSITY