Question Asking Increases Children’s Valuation of New Information

• In Event: Fostering Children’s Curiosity in Early Childhood

Abstract

Curiosity is the desire to learn. It drives our attention (Kidd & Hayden, 2015) and promotes the retention of new information (Mills et al., 2017). Curiosity bolsters educational outcomes, particularly for children from low SES backgrounds (Shah et al., 2018). While there is work inducing curiosity in the moment (Berlyne, 1960; Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), much less is known about fostering trait-like curiosity across contexts. Inspired by theories of fostering curiosity in schools (e.g., Engel, 2011, 2015), we designed an online, two-week intervention to bolster curiosity by giving children practice with information seeking by encouraging them to ask questions. In a preregistered experiment, we tested whether prompting children to ask questions influenced their curiosity-driven behaviors and learning.

Conducted over Zoom, the experiment included take-home questionnaires, a pretest, eight online training sessions, and a posttest. 103 children (five- to seven-years-old; M = 6.39) were randomly assigned to the Question-Asking (n=52) or Listening (n=51) condition. During the pretest, participants completed measures of cognitive skills and baseline science knowledge. During training sessions, children learned about animals’ ecological niches, and the experimenter prompted children based on condition. Children in the question-asking condition were prompted: “Do you have any questions?”; those in the listening condition were prompted: “You can listen carefully!”. Conducted by a condition-blind experimenter, the posttest included a science learning measure and a battery of curiosity-related tasks: question-asking about a novel animal, persistence (finding differences between nearly identical images), willingness-to-pay (trading stickers for an animal facts video), and exploration following an experimenter’s pedagogical question (toys hidden in colored envelopes, where attention was directed to blue envelopes before play).

For the posttest, we found no significant differences between conditions for the number of questions children asked or time spent on the persistence task. However, children in the Question-Asking condition learned marginally more science facts (two-tailed Wilcoxon rank sum z = 1.71, p = .09, n = 103) and valued new information significantly more (requiring more stickers to forgo the animal video; Wilcoxon rank-sum z = 2.37, one-tailed p = .009, r = 0.23, n = 103) than children in the Listening condition. Children in the Question-Asking condition also explored more variably – either focusing on blue envelopes or ignoring them, while children in the listening condition had a more normal distribution of blue envelopes opened (𝝌2(4) = 10.39, p = .03). Additional moderation analyses found a significant interaction between condition and baseline science knowledge (WJ-IV Science) on willingness-to-pay (b = 0.33, 95% CI [0.26, 0.62], t(93) = 2.39, p = .02) and that vocabulary interacted with condition to predict science learning (b = 2.08, 95% CI [0.43, 2.25], t(99) = 2.63, p = .01).

These results suggest that question asking can improve curiosity-driven behaviors and learning. Encouraging children’s questions may help them learn, but there may be variability in who benefits most. Our results also suggest that practice with question asking may increase children’s valuation of new information. Future work will investigate whether encouraging question-asking has long-term benefits for learning and curiosity.

Authors

• Joseph Colantonio, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author

• Anne Park, University of Pennsylvania

• Lourdes Marielle Delgado Reyes

• Sophie D.S. Sharp, University of Pennslyvania

• Elizabeth Bonawitz, Rutgers University - Newark

• Allyson P Mackey, University of Pennsylvania