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.