PBL Pearl Vol 2 (#11): Instilling curiosity in students

Educators and instructional designers recognize that instilling curiosity in students encourages their disposition to learn. When students are magnetized by a new idea or a new situation and are compelled to explore further, regardless of external rewards, they can be said to be truly motivated. In each new project, they discover seeds for a future project or a new question to examine. Curiosity is a heightened state of interest resulting in exploration and its importance in motivating scholarship cannot be ignored. Curiosity is also a critical component of creativity and fostering curiosity and creativity in today's learners is a challenge faced by educators and instructional designers alike.

Any discussion of curiosity must begin with Daniel Berlyne, considered to be the seminal mind in the study of curiosity. His neurophysiological view associated curiosity with exploratory behavior.

He identified two forms of exploratory behavior, diversive (e.g., seeking relief from boredom) and specific (e.g., uncertainty, conceptual conflict). It is specific curiosity that is of most interest to educators. Berlyne described specific exploration in the context of epistemic curiosity, that is, "the brand of arousal that motivates the quest for knowledge and is relieved when knowledge is procured" (1960, p. 274). It follows that epistemic curiosity results in specific exploration. This exploration ultimately resolves the uncertainty or conceptual conflict and returns the individual to a moderate, pleasurable tonus level. Although his work was cut short by his untimely death, his accomplishments paved the way for later investigations into the area of curiosity.

Berlyne's colleague, Day, extended the work, representing it graphically as a curvilinear relationship between level of arousal (or stimulation) and efficiency (1982). At the optimal level, a person enters the Zone of Curiosity characterized by exploration, excitement, and interest. Below the optimal level, the individual is unmotivated, disinterested, and inefficient. Beyond the optimal level, the individual enters a Zone of Anxiety with resulting behaviors including defensiveness, disinterest, avoidance, and inefficiency. This curvilinear explanation of curiosity was used in later studies including in an instructional design context exploring differences in young learners' curiosity and achievement in an electronic learning environment (Arnone & Grabowski, 1992, Arnone, Grabowski, & Rynd, 1994).

Whatever explanation one accepts, it cannot be dismissed that curiosity is a necessary ingredient for motivating scholarship. In his motivational design model for enhancing instruction, Keller (1987) acknowledges the important role that stimulating curiosity plays in gaining and sustaining learners' attention, the first component of his model. In fact, it has been argued that curiosity is an equally important factor in each of the other components - relevance, confidence, and satisfaction (Arnone & Small, 1995).

Next week: 10 tips to evoke curiosity in your students......

Taken from:

Using Instructional Design Strategies to Foster Curiosity
By Marilyn P. Arnone

Dr. Luterman