Less and less curious

When Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist and teacher-educator at Williams College, decided to spend a few months observing suburban elementary schools, she had a specific goal in mind: to study variations in rates of children’s curiosity.

Which kids asked lots of questions? Which classrooms tended to encourage that? But Engel discovered that it was almost impossible to make meaningful comparisons because “there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited.”

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What she kept encountering — during that project and since — were children who had learned not to bother wondering. If a classmate did volunteer a fascinated observation (“A bird flew right into my house!”) or a question (“Why would it do that?”), it was soon obvious that the teacher would probably offer a perfunctory response and then direct the child back to the planned lesson.

In one classroom, Engel heard the teacher say, “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning.”¹

For more than half a century, researchers have studied our desire to explore just for the sake of exploring, our itch to make sense of the unexpected.² The eminent educator Seymour Sarason argued that education should be dedicated, above all else, to stimulating the “intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.” Or at least avoid killing it.³

Curiosity is valuable in its own right — a passport to a richer, more fulfilling life — and not just for children. But it also contributes to academic achievement and, more important, to intellectual flourishing. Conservative commentators like to emphasize the importance of having students learn to pay attention and delay gratification,⁴ but a 2018 study in Pediatric Research found that pure curiosity promoted more effective learning regardless of the child’s level of “effortful control.”

In fact, not only was curiosity “associated with higher academic achievement in all children,” but the researchers discovered to their surprise that its benefits were greatest for kids from low-income families. (Sadly, such students are disproportionately likely to face a regimented form of instruction in which compliance is prized over discovery.)

Left to their own devices, children will often seek answers to the questions that bubble up in them. But adults can help⁵ — less by providing those answers than by eliciting, reframing, and building on their questions. They can call attention to connections between what different kids are asking. They can assist a community of learners in finding resources and thinking more deeply as they explore.

How, specifically, should teachers nurture curiosity, taking advantage of what Jerome Bruner once called the “energizing lure of uncertainty”?

• Not just by welcoming students’ questions when they diverge from the curriculum but by rethinking the curriculum itself, constructing it with students, not just for them, to address their questions about the world. That includes questions to which the teacher doesn’t know the answer — and, indeed, questions that don’t have a single right answer.
• By offering readings that cover complex and controversial topics in genuinely interesting ways. (That’s very different from depending on cutesy games or apps to tart up unengaging tasks.)
• By “priming the pump” when necessary: suggesting questions or offering information that piques students’ curiosity about things they haven’t yet considered.
• By being curious themselves. A study coauthored by Engel confirmed that “the teacher’s own behavior has a powerful effect on a child’s disposition to explore.”⁶ Perhaps curiosity belongs on an administrator’s list of qualities to look for in job applicants.
• By being keen to learn how each student’s mind works. Outstanding teachers tend to do more listening than talking — in part because, as Harvard educator Eleanor Duckworth argued, the more intensely interested a teacher is in a kid’s thinking, the more interested the kid becomes in her own thinking.
• By providing students with what psychological theorists call “autonomy support” — encouraging a sense of self-determination — which has been shown to heighten both intrinsic motivation (a concept very similar to curiosity) and the quality of learning.⁷

Alas, these recommendations for teachers often run smack into structural constraints: an inflexible schedule that doesn’t leave time for exploration; a principal who insists on quiet, orderly classrooms; a central office that imposes a standardized curriculum; a school board that cares less about learning than about test scores.

Other traditional practices, too — unhelpful but rarely questioned — have a similar effect. Among the most reliable extinguishers of the flame of curiosity are mandatory homework (making students work a second shift after a full day in school), grades and rubrics (which signal that success matters more than learning), a preoccupation with rigor (which often elicits anxiety, smothering curiosity),⁸ and the use of rewards or punishments to enforce this regimen.

Then there is the harm caused by teacher-centered direct instruction, particularly when it’s scripted or otherwise tightly controlled. Much of the problem comes from construing learning as a list of facts to be memorized or discrete skills to be practiced. The loss of curiosity is a paradigmatic example of how a focus on those short-term goals can result in deleterious side effects.

Elizabeth Bonawitz at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues found that when young children were shown exactly how to do something, they subsequently engaged in less exploration on their own than those who had received no explicit direction. Likewise, enthusiasm about reading — a key predictor of proficiency — tends to be lower when children are subjected to systematic phonics-based instruction rather than a more authentic, literature-based approach, as Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking explain in their new book The Balancing Act.⁹ Math teacher Paul Lockhart, meanwhile, described the conventional curriculum in his field as “a proven cure for curiosity” — which is also an apt epithet for worksheets.

What Susan Engel discovered to her dismay in the early grades — a diminished desire to find out — only gets worse as kids make their way through traditional schools.¹⁰ Often we don’t notice — either because, as Engel warns, we think it’s sufficient that a teacher is a nice, caring person or because we’re falsely reassured by high achieving (albeit joyless) students. As early-childhood educator Lillian Weber put it, too many kids start out as exclamation points and question marks, but leave school as plain periods.¹¹

Sure, everyone says curiosity is a lovely thing. But are we able to identify — and willing to oppose — the traditional practices and policies that fail to nurture and even actively discourage it?

NOTES

1. Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 87-89, 100; and “Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools,” Harvard Educational Review 81 (2011), p. 633.

2. The beginning of systematic research into curiosity is generally traced back to D. E. Berlyne’s work in the 1950s and ’60s with both rats (which demonstrated a preference for novelty and, even when hungry, stopped eating to explore their surroundings) and humans (who were better able to answer those questions that they had identified as surprising or engaging). Like most concepts, curiosity becomes more complex under close examination: Conclusions about its nature, its genesis, and its effects will vary depending on whether we’re talking about an enduring trait (more common in some individuals than others) or a temporary state that just about everyone experiences from time to time. In the latter, curiosity may be merely reactive (to a certain stimulus, such as wanting to know what those people over there are whispering about), whereas, for some people, it can be proactive (meaning that such individuals actively seek out questions to answer and mysteries to explore). For a useful review of theory and research on the topic, see George Loewenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity,” Psychological Bulletin 116 (1994): 75-98. For more on how curiosity in an educational context differs from related concepts such as play, engagement, and hands-on learning, see Engel, 2015, pp. 98, 166; and 2011, pp. 640-42.

3. Seymour Sarason, “Some Reactions to What We Have Learned,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1995, p. 85.

4. Effortful control — and related concepts such as self-discipline, self-regulation, and “grit” — become less necessary when curiosity is aroused or, more generally, when people care about what they’re doing. A narrow focus on promoting self-discipline in students may distract us from asking how much value there is in what students have been required to learn or whether they had any say in the matter.

5. Engel (2011, p. 638) cautions that some progressive educators, including Montessori teachers, tend to “underplay the role of adults” in children’s discovery. Their classrooms may be notable for how quiet they are, with kids “busily working on their own,” thereby missing out “on the unique opportunities afforded by asking questions and discussing answers….Talking about what interests or perplexes children gives them a chance to cultivate and expand their curiosity as an intellectual tool.”

6. Engel, 2011, p. 636.

7. Another way to promote curiosity is to make sure that tasks are neither too simple nor too difficult. And one remarkably effective way to achieve that optimal level of challenge is to give the students themselves more say about what they’re doing, a key aspect of autonomy support. Some research suggests that students often choose projects and readings that are just beyond their current level of competence. However, this is less true in the presence of grades, rubrics, or rewards for success, all of which lead them to opt for easier tasks — those they’re more likely to succeed at than to learn from. (See, for example, Fred W. Danner and Edward Lonky, “A Cognitive-Developmental Approach to the Effects of Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Child Development 52 [1981]: 1043-52.)

8. One example of the perils of overvaluing rigor is the tendency to assume that whatever is more difficult must be of higher quality. Take Advanced Placement courses, for example. Often, as John Tierney remarked, “The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.” This is why eight independent schools in the Washington, D.C. area jointly announced in 2018, “We will better equip our students for further study and for life beyond the classroom by eliminating AP courses entirely” and replacing them with courses that “demonstrate respect for students’ intellectual curiosity.”

9. Contrary to the claims offered by “science of reading” partisans, there is no convincing evidence that this loss of enthusiasm is offset by higher levels of reading proficiency, particularly with respect to the most important aspects of literacy. (This is partly because motivation, a phenomenon typically ignored by those favoring the SOR label, is itself a powerful contributor to proficiency.) For more on what the evidence actually says on this topic, see Robert J. Tierney and P David Pearson: Fact-Checking the Science of Reading (Literacy Research Commons, 2024); Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking, The Balancing Act (Routledge, 2024); David Reinking et al., “Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics?“, Teachers College Record 125 (2023): 104-31; Peter Johnston and Donna Scanlon, “An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction with Policy Implications,” Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice 70 (2021): 107-28; Jeffrey S. Bowers, “Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction,” Educational Psychology Review 32 (2020): 681-705; and Catherine Compton-Lilly et al., “Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know About the Teaching of Reading,” The Reading Teacher 77 (2023): 392-400.

10. For evidence of this diminution of intrinsic motivation as students continue through school, see Susan Harter and Bradley K. Jackson, “Trait vs. Nontrait Conceptualizations of Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivational Orientation,” Motivation and Emotion 16 (1992): 209-30; Eric M. Anderman and Allison J. Young, “Motivation and Strategy Use in Science,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 31 (1994): 811-31; and Mark R. Lepper et al., “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: A Developmental Perspective,” in Developmental Psychopathology, ed. by S. S. Luthar et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

11. Weber is quoted in William Ayers, Teaching Toward Freedom (Beacon Press, 2004), p. 41.

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