It’s no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Without curiosity, Sir Isaac Newton would have never formulated the laws of physics, Alexander Fleming probably wouldn’t have discovered penicillin, and Marie Curie’s pioneering research on radioactivity may not exist.
Research has even shown that curiosity is just as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s good for the student. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors show that curiosity is a big part of academic performance. In fact, personality traits like curiosity seem to be as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school.
Intelligence is important to academic performance, but it’s not the whole story. So psychological scientists have started looking at factors other than intelligence that make some students do better than others.
One of those is conscientiousness — basically, the inclination to go to class and do your homework. People who score high on this personality trait tend to do well in school. “It’s not a huge surprise if you think of it, that hard work would be a predictor of academic performance,” says Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh in the UK.
The researchers performed a meta-analysis, gathering the data from about 200 studies with a total of about 50,000 students. They found that curiosity did, indeed, influence academic performance. In fact, it had quite a large effect, about the same as conscientiousness. When put together, conscientiousness and curiosity had as big an effect on performance as intelligence.
Teachers have a great opportunity to inspire curiosity in their students, to make them engaged and independent learners.
Your Brain Likes Curiosity
Recently, researchers from the University of California conducted a series of experiments to discover what exactly goes on in the brain when our curiosity is aroused. So what did these experiments reveal? Here are two of the most important findings.
1. Curiosity prepares the brain for learning.
While it might be no big surprise that we’re more likely to remember what we’ve learned when the subject matter intrigues us, it turns out that curiosity also helps us learn information we don’t consider all that interesting or important.
The researchers found that, once the subjects’ curiosity had been piqued by the right question, they were better at learning and remembering completely unrelated information. For teachers and parents this highlights the critical importance of asking the right type of questions.
So if a teacher is able to arouse students’ curiosity about something they’re naturally motivated to learn, they’ll be better prepared to learn things that they would normally consider boring or difficult. For instance, if a student struggles with maths, personalising maths problems to match their specific interests rather than using generic textbook questions could help them better remember how to go about solving similar math problems in the future.
2. Curiosity makes subsequent learning more rewarding.
Aside from preparing the brain for learning, curiosity can also make learning a more rewarding experience for students.
The researchers found that when the participants’ curiosity had been sparked, there was not only increased activity in the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain involved in the creation of memories, but also in the brain circuit that is related to reward and pleasure. This circuit is the same one that lights up when we get something we really like, such as candy or money, and it relies on dopamine, a “feel-good” chemical that relays messages between neurons and gives us a sort of high.
So not only will arousing students’ curiosity help them remember lessons that might otherwise go in one ear and out the other, but it can also make the learning experience as pleasurable as ice cream or pocket money. Of course, most teachers already instinctively know the importance of fostering inquisitive minds, but to have science back it up is undeniably satisfying.
So rather than jumping straight into the answers, let’s try to start with the sort of questions that encourage children to do their own seeking.
“Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
Samuel Johnson