Promoting Question Asking to Foster Curiosity: An Intervention Study

• In Event: Fostering Children’s Early Curiosity, Engagement and Question-Asking Behavior

Abstract

Curiosity is the highly endorsed desire to learn; enhancing creativity and well-being (Jirout & Klahr, 2012), and promoting retention of new information (Mills et al.,2017). Furthermore, curiosity is highly predictive of academic achievement, particularly for children facing adversity (Shah et al., 2018). While some research describes how to promote curiosity in specific scenarios (Bonawitz & Schulz, 2007), we lack methods for boosting a general desire for new information across contexts. Therefore, we have begun designing interventions that teach children to ask more questions and will explore how children’s broad curiosity changes as a result. Specifically, we explore whether prompting children to ask more questions carries over to new tasks and improves retention of queried material. We focus on question asking as it involves key components of curiosity: highlighting inconsistencies, stemming from intrinsic motivation, defining key problems, and providing tools for engagement.

Here, we present some work and an ongoing study investigating whether prompting children to ask more questions affects their curiosity in new tasks and improves learning retention of queried material. First, in a single session pilot with 36 preschoolers, an experimenter either modeled question-asking behavior or promoted careful listening. Children that received the question modeling asked marginally more questions than those encouraged to only listen (t(34)=1.46 , p=0.07), suggesting that even brief exposure to information-seeking question structure may help engage children in material.

Experiment 1 consisted of 16 parent-led sessions. 34 4- to 10-year-old children were prompted by their parents to either ask questions (“What questions do you have?”) or to recite facts (“What facts do you remember?”) after watching videos about animals. Pretest surveys found that children in the facts condition scored significantly higher on D-Type and I-Type curiosity scales (t(32)=2.80 , p<0.01; t(32)=2.88 , p<0.05). Posttest, we found that the facts reciting condition remembered more content from the story (t(31)=2.88 , p<0.01), but found no differences between conditions on posttests measuring spontaneous question generation, task persistence, or their willingness to pay for knowledge. Pilot testing is underway for a newly developed task, the Apothecary task, which aims to measure curiosity through exploration and variability of play. Experiment 2 entails an online, experimenter-led training study currently in preparation for preregistration. Experiment 2 contains a pretest, eight training sessions, and a posttest. Children will be randomly assigned to one of two training conditions: Question-Asking (QA) or Careful Listening (CL). During pretest, participants will complete the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Vocabulary, Matrix Reasoning, Digit Span) and the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities. The posttests are those used in the parent-led Experiment 1, plus the Apothecary task. Our manipulation occurs during 8 experimenter-led training sessions, where children will be led through readings of the same content from Experiment 1, a video, and an activity. Throughout the training sessions, the experimenter will prompt children based on condition. Participants in the QA condition are regularly prompted: “Do you have any questions?”, while participants in the LC are prompted: “You can listen carefully!”.

Authors

• Joseph Colantonio, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author

• Sophie Sharp, Vassar College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allyson P Mackey, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Bonawitz, Rutgers University - Newark
  Non-Presenting Author