Supporting Early Scientific Thinking Through Curiosity

Abstract

Curiosity and curiosity-driven questioning are important for developing scientific thinking and more general interest and motivation to pursue scientific questions. Curiosity has been operationalized as preference for uncertainty (Jirout and Klahr, 2012), and engaging in inquiry-an essential part of scientific reasoning-generates high levels of uncertainty (Metz, 2004; van Schijndel et al., 2018). This perspective piece begins by discussing mechanisms through which curiosity can support learning and motivation in science, including motivating information-seeking behaviors, gathering information in response to curiosity, and promoting deeper understanding through connection-making related to addressing information gaps. In the second part of the article, a recent theory of how to promote curiosity in schools is discussed in relation to early childhood science reasoning. Finally, potential directions for research on the development of curiosity and curiosity-driven inquiry in young children are discussed. Although quite a bit is known about the development of children's question asking specifically, and there are convincing arguments for developing scientific curiosity to promote science reasoning skills, there are many important areas for future research to address how to effectively use curiosity to support science learning.

Contribution of Epistemic Curiosity and its Relevance to Science Process Skills on Biology Prospective Teacher

“…The results of this study are in line with the opinion outlined by (J. J. Jirout, 2020) that curiosity can encourage motivation to carry out scientific investigations through the process of scientific thinking. Scientific thinking is a knowledge-seeking activity that involves searching for information starting from asking questions, formulating hypotheses, making predictions, determining variables, making observations, collecting data, and making conclusions (Jirout & Zimmerman, 2015).…”

Development and Testing of the Curiosity in Classrooms Framework and Coding Protocol

“…Promoting students’ curiosity to learn in educational contexts could make learning more enjoyable and support motivation ( Midgley et al, 2001 ), which could support future learning ( Jirout et al, in review ), and it also could positively influence learning behaviors, such as question asking and class participation ( D. Park et al, 2017 ; Jirout and Klahr, 2020 ). This might be especially important and effective for domains like science ( Jirout, 2020 ), where children’s ability to ask and think about questions is seen as fundamental, with the inclusion of question asking as the first of eight scientific and engineering practices that span across all grade levels and content areas in the National Research Council’s National Science Education Standards ( NRC, 2012 ). Although the current test only looked at math instruction, we were still surprised not to have observed a single instance of teachers prompting students to generate questions, which could be an important way to help them recognize things they might be curious to know.…”

The Impact of Specific Psychological Characteristics on Decision-Making Under the Different Conditions of Risk Self-Assessment

“…Information seeking behavior is driven and motivated by individual awareness of the difference between current and target uncertain states (Gottlieb et al, 2013 ; Van de Cruys et al, 2021 ). Previous studies have shown that curiosity levels may be affected or suppressed when individuals are uncomfortable with uncertainty or believe that they have a high probability of failure (Hulme et al, 2013 ; Jirout, 2020 ). Therefore, exploratory behavior that stems from the expectation of acquiring information and interest in new experiences can be better realized in low-risk contexts.…”