Curiosity Research

If you were asked what it is that separates humans from the rest of the intelligent animals, how would you answer? There are many possible solutions that scientists offer in answer to this question. For example, tool-use is often given, but there are many animals who use tools such as monkeys, apes, birds, and fish, for example. Maybe it’s the size of our brains? There are animals out there with larger brains than humans, in fact, a whale’s brain can be 6 times larger. Perhaps it is the opposable thumbs? However, many mammals also have opposable thumbs. Now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, I am going to make you wait to reveal the answer.

In my first blog on igniting curiosity in the classroom, I introduced readers to the power of curiosity as the drive for learning. Without curiosity, true, long-term learning does not happen. In this blog, I’ll discuss some of the research backing up this claim. I have literally consumed more than 2,500 pages of research including obscure psychology journals, books written for non-educators, blog posts, and communications with psychology researchers. I will whittle this all down to 3 important points for this blog.

1. It is important to start igniting curiosity early
2. Curiosity dies without constant ignition
3. Curiosity primes the brain for learning

When we say that we want students to be lifelong learners, what we are really saying is that we want them to be curious. In order to accomplish this, we must understand some of the research behind curiosity and the strategies to enhance it.

Researchers have developed ways to measure the curiosity of infants and toddlers before they can speak. They use pointing and exploratory behavior to quantify the child’s curiosity. Research has shown that 16-month-olds who measure as more curious than their peers end up being more successful students when they are 14 years old. That is powerful and enduring!

So, how did these toddlers become more curious? By feeding their curiosity. The research showed that if a toddler points at an object and the parents ignore it, the child will stop pointing and the lack of curiosity can persist for many years. If the child points and the parents give the child the object, then the child sees pointing as a tool to get something and curiosity is low, but higher than the first group. If the child points and the parents name the object, demonstrate how it is used, and tell the child about it, not only does the child immediately explore the object more (demonstration of curiosity), but that increased curiosity lasts until they are at least 14 years old.

Pointing toddlers is not the only time in a child’s development when curiosity can be enhanced. Similar research was conducted showing the same effect with regard to how parents respond to a young child’s curiosity questions. “Why does the bunny eat like that?” “Why does a skateboard have four wheels? If a parent replies something dismissive like, “I don’t know,” then curiosity is crushed and the effect can last for many years. If the parent gives the answer, then the child sees questioning as a tool to learn facts (low level of curiosity). If the parent and the child explore together to learn the answer, then the child learns to be curious and that enhanced curiosity leads to deeper learning of the immediate subject as well as increased levels of curiosity for many years. Fortunately, further studies show that stoking curiosity in school-aged children can lead to enhanced learning and levels of curiosity as well. It can be assumed that igniting curiosity at multiple levels will have an additive effect as well as preventing decline.

Throughout history, experiments have been performed showing that when a person’s curiosity is piqued, for several minutes after, learning is enhanced. Recently, fMRI experiments have demonstrated this connection as well. The learning does not even have to be related to what sparked the curiosity. UC Davis researchers asked participants curiosity-inducing questions and then showed them pictures of faces as well as answering the curious questions while scanning their brains. The participants remembered both the answer to the question and the photo of the face longer than they did if the information followed a low-curiosity question. This fact is important to teachers because even piquing curiosity by changing something in the classroom can help students to learn history or Spanish lessons better.

Future blog posts will begin to focus on these strategies that psychologists have identified to ignite, enhance, and capitalize on curiosity.

Have you been pondering the original question about what separates humans from the other animals? Did you google it? Did you figure it out from context? Most scientists agree that there are several things, possibly the foremost of which is curiosity. Other mammals have basic curiosity, but they don’t ask why things happen or what’s their place in the universe like humans do. A large brain coupled with high levels of curiosity is a recipe for intelligence. This deep drive for learning coupled with our large, complex brains best explains our advanced intelligence.

Why Curiosity?

We’ve all done it at least once… getting lost in a Wikipedia black hole. You started looking up who won Best Picture at the Golden Globes last year, then you look up which country produces the most gold, then you google why the periodic table symbol for gold is Au, that gets you to researching who names elements in the first place, then all of a sudden, you’re reading about how heavy elements are formed in a supernova. Two and a half hours later, you realize that it is midnight and you should be in bed. Maybe for you, it was Etsy, Reddit, or Quora, but we have all done it.

It was curiosity that drove your learning extravaganza. Imagine if we could make students this hungry about learning of the Declaration of Independence, point-slope form, balancing chemical equations, or conjugating verbs in the past imperfect. The good news is that we can. Psychologists have been researching curiosity and how to enhance it since the 1960s when Daniel Berlyne wrote Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity. The next post will summarize much of this body of research.

Curiosity drives learning just like hunger drives eating and thirst drives drinking. It is an innate drive with its genesis in receptors in the brain. Another post will talk more about the biomechanics of curiosity, but in short, it is a rise in dopamine followed by a squirt of natural opioids. The anticipation of learning causes the rise in dopamine and the learning itself causes the opioid release. Rats who have been manipulated to not produce dopamine still enjoy rewards, they just do not seek them out.

Curiosity is how we evolved out of caves into the advanced societies we live in now. Curiosity is how a child learns to walk, talk, and navigate the world. Curiosity drives our travels, our hobbies, and our friendships. Curiosity is what truly separates us from the other intelligent animals. 

Some learning may be motivated by coercion, fear, grades, or mandates, but it is short-lived learning. I love learning. It is all I do. If I’m not reading, I’m writing, listening to podcasts, watching educational television (what little is left of it), or finding research papers in an online research library. And I absolutely hated school. I became a teacher because of this dichotomy. I am curious and I received pretty good grades, but none of them were motivated by curiosity. 

I cannot tell you what science class I took in 9th grade, what my teacher’s name was, or anything that I learned in the class. But I can recite every detail of the science fair project that I completed that year. I could still repeat the calculations, describe the procedure, and recall the hundreds of hours I spent looking through a telescope. Now I understand that the reason for this is that science fair projects have several features that research shows enhance curiosity (choice, autonomy, inquiry, novelty, mystery, etc.). 

I have identified about 15 tweaks that a teacher can make to their lessons, their classrooms, and their assignments to boost curiosity. None of them will require thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours, or any special skills. After the introductory material, each blog post will feature one of these 15 or so factors with examples of how to implement it in class. As a former science teacher, many of the examples will lean towards STEM. But the changes are straightforward enough that a master teacher in any subject will be able to implement them immediately given these STEM examples. 

Each blog post will include some prompts at the end. Feel free to respond to the prompts in the comments section below or on Twitter using the hashtag #IgnitingCuriosity. I look forward to hearing your ideas and feedback.

Follow-Up Prompts:

1. What is an example of a time when you were highly curious?
2. What do you already do in your classes to ignite curiosity in your students?
3. Tell the story of a student who was driven by curiosity.