Curiosity Factor #5: Autonomy

In the comments below, imagine that you are a middle school student. What would the ideal classroom be for you? What would it look like? What would it sound like? What would you be doing? You can describe it any way you'd like. Draw a picture. Record your voice and put a link to the audio file. Write a paragraph. Record a video of yourself in your classroom describing your ideal scenario. Describe it in a story, a paragraph, a poem, however you explain things best.

How would you feel about that assignment compared to, "In 125 words or less, Times New Roman, single-spaced, describe your ideal classroom in a single paragraph. Use proper spelling and grammar and submit by 11:59 PM tonight."?

One of my favorite quotes is "Nobody washes a rental car." To me this means that nobody cares about a thing unless they have some ownership of it. Which of the assignments below were you more likely to put in extra effort, do external research, enjoy, and remember in 5 years? I would argue, and the research would agree, that the assignment with the increased autonomy would lead to more passion, more effort, and deeper learning. 

In 2003, Nix, Reeve, and Hamm did a study in which they measured the effect of 3 factors on Intrinsic Motivation. The working concpet that they were exploring for IM was explained well in the opening line of their wonderful paper (quoting another wonderful paper), "Intrinsic motivation energizes important growth-fostering behaviors, such as seeking out challenges, exercising skills, and pursuing one’s interests (Deci & Ryan, 1985b)." That definition sounds to me like curiosity! So, basically what they were studying is how these 3 factors were related to curiosity.

The 3 factors that they were testing were volition, locus of causality, and choice. To be completely honest with you, I don't understand the difference between the 3. In layman's terms, they all mean "autonomy." The study found that the combination of volition and locus of causality were the most powerful combination leading to curiosity. I would explain them by saying that locus of causality means that the student feels like they are in control of their own actions and volition means how much they feel that they are able to do what they want to do and avoid what they don't want to do. OK, now that I wrote that, I still don't know what the difference is. But that's beside the point. Either way, autonomy is important to curiosity no matter what you call it.

How can you put more autonomy in your classroom? The key to autonomy is choice. Give students choice on what book they read, how they demonstrate their learning, how they communicate their learning with you, or how they are assessed. Every science teacher I know begins the school year with some kind of science safety lesson. Mine, like many others, involved making a science poster and I hung the great ones around my classroom. The students HATED this assignment. So, one year, I said, "You can make a safety poster, you can interview someone in a dangerous career about safety, you can record a podcast about science safety, or you can write about why safety is important in a science classroom. Every single student chose the poster and they LOVED it! Some said that it was their favorite project. Literally nothing changed except that they chose it.

Sometimes curiosity and self-motivation are considered related to curiosity in a theory called "self-determination." SD is based upon three factors: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In Daniel Pink's "Drive," he refers to them as Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose, the 3 keys to internal motivation. When I helped expand my current school expand from middle school to high school, we designed the school around these 3 principles. For example, we created a course called STEM Studio in which students had an entire year to work on one or more STEM projects that they were curious about and that had an impact on their community. Students built drones, designed aeroponics systems, created video games, and one even hosted a 10K where they gave out heart-healthy dog treats that they had created. It was invigorating to see the motivation of these students.

If you asked me what my ideal classroom would look like, it would certainly involve high levels of student autonomy whenever feasible.

pursuing one’s interests (Deci & Ryan, 1985b).

Curiosity Factor #4: Anchoring

In the movie, The Martian, rescue attempts are hampered because (as scientists explain) there are only particular windows to launch a craft from Earth to Mars and these windows are approximately 2 years apart. Why is this? Why can’t we just launch any time we want and aim at Mars? Click the link below to explore this question in a simulation. Use the buttons to the right to change the date and click the yellow launch button to try and land the spacecraft on Mars. If you miss, change the date and keep trying until you achieve success.

https://interactives.ck12.org/simulations/physics/journey-to-mars/app/index.html

Anchoring is a technique of beginning a lesson with a video, demonstration, photo, story, experiment, phenomenon, or other curiosity-inducing activity. Typically, the activity is directly correlated with the learning, but recall from the Research on Curiosity blog post that initiating a state of curiosity prepares a brain for learning even if the learning is not connected to the curiosity-enhancing activity. The Mars activity has nothing to do with this article, but it now has your brain primed with curiosity.

Many teachers are already familiar with this technique as English teachers prepare students for reading a chapter by giving them historical background, an engineering teacher begins a unit with an engineering challenge, a social studies teacher has students role-play a famous court decision, or a science teacher does an inquiry experiment. Recall that the second step in the 7-E Inquiry Lesson plan is to “Engage” the students. “The New Teacher’s Companion” by Gini Cunningham calls this phase “Pulling Students into the Excitement of Learning” and I LOVE that description.

The Next Generation Science Standards are based on the foundation of “Phenomenon-Based Learning.” Phenomena are used in two ways in an NGSS lesson. In the beginning, the phenomenon is used to anchor the lesson and engage the students. In the end, a phenomenon can be used to test the student’s ability to explain the science behind the phenomenon as a practical assessment. There are numerous websites filled with videos, animations, and photos that science teachers can use as anchor and practical assessment phenomena.

A research and corporate learning management group called Valamis showed that phenomenon-based learning (PhBL) increases performance even in online classes. Before their conversion to PhBL, their online classes had a pass rate of 49%. Two years after converting to PhBL, the pass rate shot up to 70% and grades in the courses went up as well. 

Beyond just anchoring and assessment, understanding the phenomenon can turn into a self-guided constructivist learning activity on its own. The entire lesson can be centered around students investigating a phenomenon and presenting their learning at the end. For example, when middle school Language Arts students are learning the Common Core Standard, “Achieve an effective balance between researched information and original ideas,” they can be given a variety of news websites to peruse and categorize the articles by Editorial, Opinion, Factual, or Feature articles by analyzing the percentage of researched information and original ideas. Students can explore the topic using high-interest articles, discussing their thoughts with classmates, and presenting to the class their conclusions. Then, throughout the lesson, the teacher can refer back to those articles to demonstrate and/or assess what is being learned.

Phenomena are a great way to anchor a lesson, engage students, and spark curiosity. Just like the simulation at the beginning of this post, if we launch into a lesson too soon without setting the right conditions first, then we miss our target. Ha! I did tie the lesson back to the anchor phenomenon!

Curiosity Factor #3: Mystery

Ponder this question for a few minutes and see if you can come up with a solution.

You are the manager of a hardware store and three boxes arrive from the warehouse and the delivery driver says, “The warehouse told me that all 3 boxes have the wrong label on them. One has only bolts, one has only nuts, and one has both nuts and bolts.” You need to drop ship these boxes to the buyers, hopefully without damaging all of the boxes. How could you take only one item out of only one box and then label them all properly?

That’s a mysterious question, right? It seems as though there’s not enough information or that something is missing. Exactly. We’ll discuss a solution at the end. Don't look ahead!

Why do humans like to play video games? Why do we like to explore nature? Why do we read and watch movies? Why do we enjoy gifts so much? We spend a great deal of time enjoying these activities because of the mystery. What happens on the next level of this game? What’s over the top of that hill? How will the protagonist get out of this bind that she has found herself in? What will happen if I mix these chemicals? What’s in the box?

How can a teacher increase mystery in their class? Any teacher of any subject can do it with just a few tweaks.

Puzzles: Puzzles embed mystery into an activity. I watched a group of geometry students reviewing for a test by solving math problems to get clues to open locks on a mystery box (this one happened to be a BreakoutEDU box) with a treat inside. They were so motivated by the mystery of opening the box that they didn’t even realize that they were doing math problems. Many people have put instructions online about how to do miniature or virtual escape room activities in their classrooms. Students pay good money to go to escape rooms. They’ll be thrilled to do one in math class!

Discrepant Events: Discrepant events are events that students believe are going to turn out one way and they turn out a totally different way. They could be exceptions to a rule (mammoths that lay eggs, numbers that cannot be on the bottom of a fraction, the octet rule in chemistry). Often discrepant events are science demonstrations that surprise the viewer, but there’s so much more to discrepant information than that.

Probative Questions: English teachers are so good at this...setting up a mystery by asking students what they think will happen next or what they think that an object or action in the story means. These conversations are what make literature exciting and turn students into lifelong readers. Students are apt to be motivated to read ahead when their teacher sets up this curious state. The following series of questions can be used in any classroom at any grade level to engage mystery and enhance curiosity.

What did you notice?

What do you wonder?

What else do you need to know?

Special note for math teachers: Dan Meyer has a great TED talk about mathematics that demonstrates how to take word problems, which students generally hate, and turn them into curiosity-inducing mystery problems that kids will love. Solving word problems is probably the most important skill that students will learn in mathematics. Anything that motivates students to get better at this skill will reap great benefits.

Meyer recommends taking all of the “given” information out of a book word problem and turning it into a real-world problem. Instead of giving the dimensions of a container and asking how long it will take to fill it up, take a video of a real container filling up. Have students take measurements, ask questions, and perform their calculations, and then watch how glued they are to the video seeing if their answer was correct...if they solved the mystery.

Check out the video here: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_class_needs_a_makeover?language=en

Now, back to the question at the beginning. The catch is that if you reach into a box that has both nuts and bolts in it, then you’re stuck. Because they are all known to be marked wrong, the one that says nuts and bolts on it definitely does NOT have both. If you reach into that box, you are guaranteed to be reaching into a box containing a single type of item. So reach into the “Nuts and Bolts” box, label that one with whatever is in it, and then swap the other two labels. Simple enough? Engaged by the mystery?

Curiosity and Equity

Our nation is in the midst of an equity crisis and has been for some time now. Statistics for graduation, post-high school access, employment, incarceration, and government assistance all demonstrate the crisis. It is not an ability crisis, not an effort crisis, not an innate intelligence crisis. It is an access and opportunity crisis created by the systems we have in place.

What, you might be asking, does this have to do with curiosity? I once heard a speaker talk of “the equity of an excellent education.” Education cannot alone solve systemic racism, homelessness, or wage gaps, but it can help to close inequities such as test scores gaps, college access gaps, and as a result, many of the other gaps listed above.

Before we go any further, I want to make sure that we agree on one thing. ALL students deserve a great education (which I have argued must include a healthy dose of curiosity-inducing activities) and all groups of students are equally capable given the same tools and experiences.

Since you’re still reading, I’m assuming that you don’t disagree with that statement. But before we can delve any deeper, I want to make sure that we have the same base knowledge at our disposal. I will put a link to some pertinent research below. It is an incredibly interesting (and sobering) read. But if you’re busy and you trust me to summarize it accurately, I will do so below the link.

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/hiddencurriculum.htm

Jean Anyon, an educational researcher, found that educational outcomes across schools with varying economics deviate in well-known and predictable patterns. No surprises. Dr. Anyon set out to determine what explains these discrepancies. Most people have their hypotheses, but Dr. Anyon visited a large number of schools across the entire spectrum of economic demographies.

Dr. Anyon concluded that it is not the physical school buildings, not the bell schedules, not the years of experience of the teachers, not how prestigious the teacher’s university was, but instead the specific strategies that the teacher uses to instruct students. What struck me in reading the description of the strategies being used is how as she climbed the economic ladder of schools, the strategies got more and more curiosity-laden. Not only are students of poverty being robbed of these excellent learning opportunities, but also the long-lasting effects that we have spoken about in previous posts.

The research suggested that teachers may believe that students who are experiencing poverty must perform foundational, rote activities before getting to curiosity-igniting tasks later. Often, the lessons never get to those high levels of curiosity and then it becomes a vicious cycle resulting in a lack of curiosity resulting in disadvantages lasting many years. The teachers of affluent students skip right over the foundational lessons and jump straight into the rich, curiosity-inducing tasks right away.

Another researcher, Martin Haberman, took this study one step farther and made a list of common strategies that he saw at urban schools:
• Giving information,
• Asking questions,
• Giving directions,
• Making assignments,
• Monitoring seatwork,
• Reviewing assignments,
• Giving tests,
• Reviewing tests,
• Assigning homework,
• Reviewing homework,
• Settling disputes,
• Punishing noncompliance,
• Marking papers, and
• Giving grades.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1570/2df70734cb15a165c988db86c68d9759528a.pdf

Notice how none of these activities were included in the introductory blogs explaining what curiosity-rich instruction looks like.

Schools that are igniting student curiosity are giving their students lifelong advantages. My experience has shown me that these same schools that are less likely to be using curiosity-inducing strategies in class are also less likely to have debate teams, participate in Academic Decathlon, offer advanced STEM coursework, compete in the science fair, provide opportunities to express artistic abilities, arrange internships for students, or offer courses in computer programming, robotics, and engineering. A study by the Kapor center found, “Low-income schools are 4x less likely to offer AP Computer Science A courses than high-income schools.” The lack of curiosity strategies in the classroom compounded with the lack of curiosity activities outside of the classroom likely explains a portion of the achievement gap that we are seeing.

The Cure for Boredom blog is an attempt to give teachers the tools to increase the amount of curiosity in ALL classrooms. The ideas do not necessarily cost any money and will work with every student. There are also solutions outside of the classrooms as well. Twelve years ago, I noticed that only affluent students whose parents were professors, doctors, or scientists were winning at high-level science fairs. I wanted to put the "fair" in science fair, so, I began a Science Fair Expo in my county where I arranged for more than 30 science professors and professional scientists to sit in a room and meet with any student to discuss their projects and potentially be invited to work in the scientist’s lab. Attendees come from diverse backgrounds and help level the science fair playing field. Hundreds of students per year have attended the event for the last 10 years helping to level the playing field. The movie Spare Parts also told the true story of a high-poverty school being very successful in robotics competitions. An Arduino nano clone costs $4 and allows students’ computer programming to come alive in the real world building 3-D printers, robots, and much more, launching their curiosity and building useful skills.

Research shows that curiosity-inducing activities have enduring effects on academic achievement and this lack of opportunity certainly contributes a portion to achievement gaps. This is an equity issue, an access issue, and a fixable issue.

What is your school currently doing to give all students opportunities to participate in curiosity-inducing activities?

Curiosity Research Part 2: Curiosity and IQ

In Major League Baseball, the median ranked player (according to fantasy baseball rankings) made $3.25 million dollars last year (Leury Garcia). The player at the top 22nd percentile (Shin-Soo Choo) made $21 million and the player at the bottom 22nd percentile (Sam Gaviglio) did not receive a contract offer in 2019. The average adult male is 5’10” tall. An adult male at the top 22nd percentile is over 6’1” tall and the bottom 22nd percentile 5’7” tall.

Why do I tell you this? I’m trying to instill that a difference of 0.8 standard deviations is a significant difference. What if I could tell you that researchers found something that could increase a 3-year old’s IQ by 0.8 standard deviations or 12 IQ points? You’ve probably already guessed what it is.

In, “Stimulation Seeking and Intelligence: A Prospective Longitudinal Study,” Raines, Reynolds, Venables, and Mednick (link below) tested both the intelligence and curiosity of nearly 2,000 three-year-olds. They used a modified test appropriate for the age group using block stacking and visual tasks instead of reading and math problems like a typical IQ test. Then, they waited 5 years and tested the students again.

You’ve probably already figured out what they found. They found that 3-year olds showing high levels of curiosity (“high stimulation-seeking”) had IQs 12 points higher than their low curiosity counterparts and did better in school and had higher reading levels as well when they were 8 years old. Twelve IQ points puts those kids at the top 22nd percentile in intelligence if they began exactly average.

The effect size was between 0.5 and 0.77 which is significantly high. In Visible Learning, John Hattie considered anything above 0.4 to be significant. Researchers consider 0.5 to be medium and 0.8 to be high. An effect size of 0.8 means that 79% of the high curiosity group scored higher on IQ tests than the mean of the low curiosity group. If there was no relationship, one would expect a 50% rate.

This change of 12 points is important. An IQ of 100 is considered average and 115 is considered mildly gifted. In Curiosity Research Part 1, we found that another study found that infants whose curiosity was stoked outperformed their peers in school up to 15 years later. Since researchers have estimated that 50% of intelligence is inherited, that leaves another 50% that is fluid and impressionable. Curiosity Factor #1 and Curiosity Factor #2 each laid out some simple, no-cost tweaks that can ignite curiosity and igniting curiosity can have a lasting impact on a student’s intelligence.

Keep coming back to the blog for more of these research-based tips to ignite curiosity. Post your ideas in the comments section below how you’ve used these tips in your classroom.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-824663.pdf

Curiosity Factor #2: Inquiry

           Before we get started with this blog, I’d like to ask a favor of you. Please go over to this link filled with great resources on the topic we are about to explore and poke around for a while.  I’ll wait here while you explore. Take your time.

https://www.edutopia.org/article/inquiry-based-learning-resources-downloads

            Thanks! Great to have you back. The topic that we are about to explore, one that psychology research has shown to enhance curiosity, is Inquiry. There are many definitions and types of inquiry: Scientific Inquiry, Argument Driven Inquiry (ADI), Guided Inquiry, Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL), and many more. My experience as a science educator has shown me that Scientific Inquiry is somewhat different than the others which are all very similar. 

            Scientific Inquiry is a process of teaching in which the amount of involvement of the student and teacher in the science activity varies according to the chart below.

Level 0: Teacher provides the question, teacher provides the procedure, students already know how it will turn out. (Not inquiry-based, "cookbook" experiment)

Level 1: Teacher provides the question, teacher provides the procedure, students do NOT know how it will turn out. (Structured Inquiry)

Level 2: Teacher provides the question, student determines the procedure, students do NOT know how it will turn out. (Guided Inquiry)

Level 3: Student determines the question, student determines the procedure, students do NOT know how it will turn out. (Open Inquiry, typically science fair projects and the like)

            The goal of a science teacher is to ask themselves how they might bump an activity up to the next level of Inquiry. Simply doing an activity before students have learned a concept bumps Level 0 up to Level 1. Teachers cannot and should not attempt to teach every concept via Open Inquiry (OI) for there is not enough time in a school year for that and not every concept lends itself to OI. But important topics that lend themselves well make good targets.

            The other forms of Inquiry have several things in common. They all involve having students explore concepts before being formally introduced to them.  In an English class, this might appear as having students tell a story to the group about what it might be like to get lost in fog before reading the chapter in Huckleberry Finn where Huck and Jim get separated in thick fog. In an economics class, students might do a simulation with fake products and money to discover that an abundance of product drives down prices and vice versa before learning about supply and demand.

            The best template I have seen for creating an Inquiry lesson is the 7-E Lesson Plan listed below.

Elicit- Where teachers draw out students’ prior understandings and experiences

Engage- Where teachers generate enthusiasm for a topic through real-world examples, discussions, debates

Explore- Here, students begin a project, write an introduction to a paper, prepare for a presentation

Explain- This is the traditional lesson part of the plan

Elaborate- Here, students apply what they’ve learned to other situations and formative differentiation occurs

Evaluate- Teachers evaluate students’ understanding of the concepts

Extend- Students receive either enrichment or intervention activities

            Notice that in a 7-E lesson plan, explaining the concept is the fourth step in the process. Students are experiencing the concept before they learn the formalities and the equations and definitions. For example, math teachers express that students often misapply calculations because they don’t remember when they are allowed to use an algorithm and when they are not. Before discussing the Pythagorean Theorem, a math teacher could give students a page with various triangles on it and ask them to verify whether the relationship a² + b² = c² is always true. Students will discover on their own that it is only true for right triangles and they will remember that much longer than if they were just told that rule. Sometimes this practice is called “Activity Before Concept” (ABC) and that is a very apt name for it.

"Following directions conserves energy, but following one's unique direction expands energy."
- Ian Kashdan, Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life

            Remember at the beginning of this blog post when I asked you to go out and explore on your own? Now, you’ll likely be able to explain the pedagogy behind that. Activity before concept...Inquiry...ignites curiosity and improves learning. Try to bump up the level of Inquiry in your classroom as well.

Think of a lesson that you have coming up. In the comments below or on Twitter (@mhortonleads), explain how you will add Inquiry to the lesson.

Curiosity Factor #1: Novelty

Below is an audio player with a sound effect. Please click on the play button before continuing to read below.

What did you feel when you heard that tone? If you're a modern iPhone user, you probably felt anxious and wanted to glance at your phone to see what new information was coming through. The urge may have even been irresistible and you actually checked your phone. Honestly, did you check your phone when you heard it?  This is the power of "Novelty." Imagine if you could make students that hungry to devour World History, Geometry, Chemistry, or The Great Gatsby. Your phone and many advertising campaigns have been specifically designed to trigger this human desperation for novelty.

Our brain is a novelty-seeking machine. Seeking out novel experiences is how cavemen moved out into the plains, it's how toddlers learn about the world, and why you cannot check the time on your phone without seeing what's new on Twitter, who texted you, if that auction finally ended on eBay, and what happened on The Bachelor last night. Novelty is one major key to opening students' brains to learning.

But, you might ask, "How do I make the Pythagorean Theorem novel?" I contend that you can make the Pythagorean Theorem novel but it is not necessarily a requirement as you will see. First, let me summarize some research. Scientists asked people to rank how curiosity-inducing a list of trivia questions were. They then put subjects in brain scanning machines (fMRI) and asked them these same trivia questions and then showed them pictures of faces. Later, they showed them those same faces mixed in with random faces and asked them which ones they recognized. They statistically significantly recognized faces more often if they followed a high curiosity trivia question than a low curiosity trivia question. The faces had nothing to do with the trivia questions.

Further research showed that the recognition of these faces lasted longer, even days longer because curiosity was induced first and that this brain-priming effect lasts for 5-15 minutes after the curiosity event. Of course, there's far more research behind this, and this was a cursory look at it. But bear in mind that the research has shown that when curiosity is sparked, learning is enhanced, even when the learning has nothing to do with the curiosity event.

What this means for the classroom, is that all you need to do is spark curiosity and students' brains will be primed for learning whatever you are about to teach. For example, you may lead into a very difficult calculus lesson by replacing chairs with bean bags. You might begin the class with a short curiosity-inducing video clip, trivia question, or partner activity. Students might walk in and there are virtual reality goggles on their desks with instructions on how to do a virtual field trip. Maybe there are clues taped to the walls around the classroom and a box with a combination lock on their desks. None of these things have anything to do with the Pythagorean Theorem, but all will induce curiosity through novel stimuli and prime the brain to learn more math.

For years, teachers have been taught that students need structure. They need to walk into a familiar classroom every day with familiar procedures and a familiar lesson plan. If you hope to create passive students who sit in rows and absorb some of the information that they're exposed to, then structure and predictability are key. But, if you want to create curious, exploratory, interested, deep, lifelong learners, then mix things up because novelty is the major key to curiosity. You can still have procedures for turning in homework or requesting to go to the restroom. But sprinkle novelty into your lessons and the research demonstrates that student learning will improve. Now, you've waited long enough, go see what new deal popped up on the coupon app on your phone.

In the comments below, share how you've introduced novelty into your classroom or into a lesson.