Curiosity Factor #10: Open-Endedness

     by Mike Horton

Imagine that there are two tables in front of you. One table has a billion dollars on it. The other table is piled high with scientific research and has the best scientists in the world seated around it. You get to choose. You can either donate the billion dollars to diabetes charities or you can lead the group of scientists in analyzing the research to search for a cure for diabetes with a billion dollar budget. Which do you choose?

Your choice is an indication of your “Need for Cognition,” a near synonym for curiosity in psychology research. NFC is a measure of an individual’s craving to deeply understand concepts and their connections to other concepts. Researchers have shown a moderate correlation with verbal and fluid intelligence (reasoning ability) and a smaller but significant correlation to crystallized intelligence (knowledge).* These are exactly what schools hope to develop in our students, so one of our main goals should be to amplify Need for Cognition in students. 

Although I was unable to find direct evidence that NFC can be developed, it is certainly suggestive since we know that intelligence is not fixed and that NFC is closely correlated with intelligence. It makes sense that if one has been proven to not be fixed, then the other closely-related factor must not be fixed either. Twin studies have shown that about 60% of intelligence is genetic and the other 40% is environmental. This suggests that not only can we develop NFC, but that developing NFC may also augment intelligence. 

Susan Land defined “Open-Ended Learning Environments'' as those in which students engage in “authentic problem solving; generate, test, and revise hypotheses; explore and manipulate concepts; and reflect on what they know.” Then, the goal should be to increase opportunities in these areas as students mature. It is clear that a kindergartener is not as capable of OELE activities as 11th graders are, so these techniques should not be initiated suddenly or at too early of an age, but gradually introduced and increased in frequency. 

Many of the techniques described by Dr. Land have already been discussed previously. For example, generating, testing, and revising hypotheses is exactly what we described in the Inquiry blog. I was at a technology conference once where the presenter asked a question that distilled the essence of Open-Endedness very well. The presenter asked “What did you teach yesterday that the students cannot just Google?” She then went on to explain that in the 21st century, teaching shouldn’t be about facts, it should be about the application of those facts, the importance of the facts, how these facts fit together with previous facts to contribute to the bigger picture, and how we have come to know these facts. That is how I see open-endedness, discussing and debating google-able (is that a word?) information. 

In my career as a teacher, all of the most memorable lessons that I taught were either incredible science demonstrations, magnificent projects, or debates. I have used debates many times in my science classes and they are among the most powerful and memorable techniques of all. Students came back to my class many years later, still wanting to debate whether we should be harvesting kelp, whether recycling newspapers is good for the environment, or whether centrifugal force really exists. I once sat in an AVID class that was debating whether General Sherman was a good leader or a bad one. His “scorched Earth” methodologies were barbaric, but his victories paved the way for the freeing of the slaves. Near the end of the period, students asked the teacher if they could stay in at lunch and finish this very productive activity. This lesson was 9 years ago and I assure you that every student in that class remembers who General Sherman was. My son was in that class and he still remembers. 

It must be acknowledged that I’m not saying that everything lends itself to debate or that all topics can be taught in an open-ended manner. What I do endorse is selecting the most essential topics that you teach, the ones with Leverage, Readiness, and Endurance, those that you hope students will remember for a long time, and infuse some open-endedness into them. 

I hope that your need for cognition has been sparked and you’ll investigate open-endedness even more and collaborate with your colleagues on bumping up the levels, frequency, and depth of your OELE experiences. 

*Fleischhauer, M.; Enge, S.; Brocke, B.; Ullrich, J.; Strobel, A.; Strobel, A. (2009). "Same or Different? Clarifying the Relationship of Need for Cognition to Personality and Intelligence". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 36 (1): 82–96.

Land, S.M. Cognitive requirements for learning with open-ended learning environments. ETR&D 48, 61–78 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02319858

Curiosity Factor #9: Research on Reducing Boredom

Whatever you're reading this on, whether a book or device, take some time to follow this procedure now. Touch the upper left corner, touch the bottom right corner, touch the upper right, then touch the bottom left. Count one. Continue this, increasing the count each time until you give up out of boredom. How long did you make it? Keep reading to find out why this task was so boring.

The opposite of curiosity is boredom and a great deal of research has been done on what boredom is and how to reduce it. This research has great utility in identifying ways to increase curiosity by reducing boredom. Reducing boredom doesn't necessarily cause curiosity, but it creates an atmosphere where curiosity can thrive. Curiosity cannot thrive in the stifling atmosphere of boredom.

The best definition that we have for boredom is that it's when a person decides that another task would hold more value that the one that they are currently spending vital resources on. We can't possibly convince students that their hobbies are less important, so the key would be to convince them that the current task is very important. The more that this importance gap can be reduced, the less likely a student is to become bored.

Researchers (Gilbert and Wilson) did an experiment to find out what factors influence boredom. They set up tedious, boring tasks and then changed the scenario to see how the changes would affect levels of boredom. They had participants turn 8 knobs a quarter of a turn each and then start all over again, repeating this sequence for hours.

As we already knew from previous chapters, novelty reduces boredom greatly. Most of the boredom-inducing tasks were repetitive and monotonous, not novel. Refer back to (Novelty Blog) for more on how to increase novelty.

Researchers also found that rewards (monetary in their case) were powerful influencers of boredom with a dosage response; the bigger the reward, the less boredom. This is more difficult to implement in the classroom, but many teachers use other kinds of reward systems to motivate students. 

The researchers found that putting progress bars, speed indicators, and ranking systems also reduced boredom. This immediate feedback was a very powerful influencer for participants to continue the menial task. Teachers use "gamification" the same way in the classroom. We will have a blog on gamification soon.

Researchers also found that the more challenging they made the task, the less boring it was... to a point until it got too difficult and got boring again. So it goes in the classroom where matching the challenge level to the student is very important in inducing curiosity. Give a 10th grader 2nd-grade math or differential equations problems and they'll get bored. But give them problems just above their current capability but within reach and they'll rise to the challenge through curiosity.

Another group of researchers set out to test the hypothesis that people get bored after retirement. They found that this relationship was only true for those who did not participate in social activities. Curiosity is social and individual work is more likely to be boring.

A teacher can create an atmosphere that will be more likely to reduce boredom and increase curiosity. Previous blog posts have focused on the latter and future posts will focus on the former. How far did you make it on the corner tapping activity? It was not social, not novel, not valuable, and not very challenging, the epitome of boring and the antithesis of curiosity.

Curiosity Factor #6: Story-Telling

We have a new blogger on the team, Mike Alpert! From now on, I'll note who the author of each blog post is. Connect with Mike at @heymikealpert on Twitter.

Curiosity and Storytelling, Mike Alpert

The power of storytelling cannot be overstated, both on an individual and group basis. Indeed, the legendary American author and Sarah Lawrence professor Joseph Campbell believed that myths - or culturally-important, symbolic narratives - are integral to both psychological and societal health.[1]

Most seasoned teachers have learned that narrative is a sure-fire way to grab the attention of a classroom. We are evolutionarily hard-wired to tune-in to stories. Researchers have speculated that it’s how our ancestors communicated about important knowledge that preserved survival. And it’s no surprise that teachers can have a similar impact.

There’s an old saying, “If you want me to understand something, put it in a story.” This is most certainly true. Anytime I’d look across the small sea of faces and see a hint of boredom, I’d subtly transition to the beginning of a story. “I remember this time when I was in sixth grade,” and, like magic, I’d see ears perk up and eyes gravitate directly to me. The interesting thing was, I could hook any piece of information to my story and students would remember it. Without that narrative hook, however, my factoids on the continental divide would be forgotten almost immediately. It turns out that embedding it into a story about seeing a grizzly bear in Glacier National Park created the right frame to hang on geographic facts like little ornaments.

This happens in part because we create curiosity when we tell an incomplete story. A 2020 study[2] used computer modeling to analyze about 40,000 conventional stories, including novels and storylines from movies. The analysis revealed a common underlying structure across this massive variety of narratives that included an initial staging phase, a plot progression phase, and a tension/conflict phase. This is similar to the concept of a narrative’s “arc” as originally outlined by well-known German novelist and scholar Gustav Freytag. Applied to the classroom, it’s not a significant leap to assume students can sense the beginning of a story and will anticipate the subsequent phases, creating engagement through heightened curiosity.

As storytellers, this curiosity creates a connection with our audience that can be quite strong. Indeed, there’s recent research that shows just how powerful this connection can be. Princeton Neuroscientist Uri Hassan has spent years focusing on brain-to-brain coupling during narrative storytelling. Hassan used brain scan imaging to prove something fascinating.

Imagine that you went to the movies and saw the latest action-adventure saga. Researchers can image your brain and see which areas light up while watching. Next, suppose you go home and tell your kids about the movie. As it turns out, the same parts of their brain will light up as if they were watching the movie themselves. What’s more, in a short amount of time, their stimulated brain areas will be activated prior to your own, as they anticipate the next event in the story.[3] They subconsciously begin to guess what will happen next, and this anticipation increases their comprehension.

Through the use of this brain-to-brain coupling, teachers can use narrative to link neural processes with their students and build anticipation. This anticipation also increases comprehension, which has a direct impact on learning in the classroom, creating the engagement necessary to retain information.

In considering how to use stories strategically in the classroom, it’s important to remember the lesson from our earlier discussion of dopamine. In Chapter One, we noted that rising dopamine creates a feeling of anticipation and high levels of dopamine produce a feeling of satisfaction. Similarly, we can hook students' attention and create that feeling of anticipation - or curiosity - through the use of story by means of adjusting what researcher Marina Bianchi refers to as “collative variables.”[4] While we can always make stories more compelling by adding elements of love, hate, danger, or fear, the audience can definitely be turned off by too much of any of these individual elements. Instead, Bianchi describes the more subtle way in which what she refers to as “collative variables” like “complexity, variety, novelty, or ambiguity” impact an audience. These variables are much more nuanced, but can be very potent, and they can build anticipation.

Adjusting these variables works because we’re often either bored by a topic that seems too familiar or overwhelmed by a topic that seems too foreign. Dialing up the complexity on ordinary subjects or reducing complexity on unfamiliar ideas can increase curiosity and make us feel either more interested or more comfortable. Either way, we become more curious.

Revisiting our previous example, let’s imagine that the first words out of my mouth regarding the continental divide consist of words like “watershed” and “hydrological.” It’s probable that the majority of eleven-year-olds before me begin to think about the video game they were playing last night or the text message that’s waiting for them in their backpack.

As I insert the phrase, “I remember one time …” and continue the story about my childhood trip to Montana, their attention snaps back into place. And, before long, I explain, “I saw the shape of Triple Divide Peak and began to understand how water on either side could flow to different oceans and, all of a sudden, the idea of the continental divide made a lot of sense.”

If I’m going about it correctly, I’m doing two things here. First, I’m relying on one of the basic narrative arcs that have been well established throughout history, much like the ones that were identified by both Freytag and the computer-aided study of tens of thousands of stories. Students are familiar with these and, as I start a story, they’re naturally pulled in by a desire to know what’s next. Second, I adjust the complexity, variety, or novelty in my story to convey my content.

In the end, these more technical aspects point toward a truth that so many of us know intuitively - as do our students. Good stories are intrinsically engaging. It’s no nefarious sleight of hand to smuggle our important content into those inherently interesting sagas. Indeed, if it’s incumbent upon us to teach in the most relevant method possible, we’d be fools to pass up such an opportunity

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^[1] “Joseph Campbell.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 26 Oct. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Campbell-American-author.

 

^[2] R. L. Boyd, K. G. Blackburn, J. W. Pennebaker, The narrative arc: Revealing core narrative structures through text analysis. Sci. Adv. 6, eaba2196 (2020).

[3] Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision
Uri Hasson, et al.
Science 303, 1634 (2004);

DOI: 10.1126/science.1089506

 

[4] Bianchi, Marina (2014) : The magic of storytelling: How curiosity and aesthetic preferences work, Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, ISSN 1864-6042, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), Kiel, Vol. 8, Iss. 2014-44, pp. 1-30, http://dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2014-44