Curiosity in the classroom through supportive instruction

• In Event: 3-028 - Pedagogies for curiosity and creativity: Children’s learning during exploratory play

Integrative Statement

Curiosity provides the motivation to face challenges and explore uncertainty in order to gain new information (Jirout & Klahr, 2012, Engel, 2011), and is commonly believed to be important for education. However, students do not perceive curiosity to be related to learning in school or report feeling curious about academic content (Post & Walma van der Molen, 2018), and curiosity is often believed to decrease with formal schooling, perhaps due to an educational system that is inconsistent with curiosity and exploration (Jirout, Vitiello, & Zumbrunn, 2018; Engel, 2011). This study explored the role that teachers can play in promoting student curiosity.

To address both the cognitive processes involved in curiosity and potential methods of promoting curiosity in education, curiosity is operationalized to include both the person and the environment: curiosity as uncertainty preference (Jirout & Klahr, 2012), based on the Information Gap theory (Loewenstein, 1994). Individuals vary in terms of the level of uncertainty most likely to lead to exploration, and higher uncertainty preference relates to positive academic behaviors, such as persistence and question asking (Jirout & Klahr, 2012). The current study explored frequency of instructional practices to promote a) recognition of and comfort with uncertainty, and b) exploration and information seeking to resolve uncertainty found to promote curious behaviors in a lab setting (see Table 1; Jirout, Vitiello, & Zumbrunn, 2018). We also explored whether patterns of curiosity promotion differed in math and science lessons, as inquiry-related processes are generally more of a focus in science than in math learning (Newcombe et al., 2009).

Preliminary analyses were conducted for 244 videos of preschool lessons (142 math, 102 science). Videos were 6.88 to 39.02 minutes long (M=16.0, SD=6.2). Rate of curiosity promotion was calculated to estimate frequency expected per hour. Of all lessons coded, 90% had at least one instance of curiosity promotion, though less than half had more than one type of curiosity. Using rate of frequency, we estimate that there would be, on average, 11.8 (SD= 9.67) instances of curiosity promotion per hour. Most commonly observed was the broad category of providing opportunities to think, participate, and question, averaging a rate of 8.0 (SD 7.8) instances an hour, with 82.6% of videos including at least one instance. The next highest rate of curiosity promotion was providing opportunities to explore, “figure out”, and problem solve, with a rate of 1.3 (3.08) instances an hour, though only 23.5% of videos including at least one instance. The least common type of curiosity promoting instruction was prompting students to generate questions, with no instances coded across the 247 videos. Other curiosity-promoting instruction types were infrequent, with means ranging from 0.20-0.95 instances per hour (SD=0.89-3.00). Science lessons were significantly more likely to have at least one instance of curiosity promotion (χ2=6.91, p=.009), and had a higher overall rate (science M=13.5 instances/hour, math M= 10.7 instances/hour for math; t=2.89, p=.004). Further analysis on the full coded sample, including associations with other teacher and student-level variables will be presented, and implications for educational practice discussed.

Authors

• Jamie Jirout, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Virginia Vitiello, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author