Is curiosity important?

Is curiosity important?

Or is curiosity just some fuzzy idea that granola eating hippies like to talk about while doing yoga, hugging trees and reading about Karl Marx?

Susan Engel wrote a remarkable piece on The Case for Curiosity:

What might explain the gap between the intense curiosity of young children and the apparent lack of curiosity among older children? I think many adults implicitly believe that children naturally get less curious over time. This belief isn't totally unreasonable. Data do suggest that curiosity becomes less robust over time (Coie, 1974). And if curiosity is, as psychologists say, the urge to explain the unexpected, then as more of everyday life becomes familiar, a child might encounter fewer unexpected objects and events. Perhaps the reduced curiosity of the 7-year-old is simply a by-product of that child's increased knowledge. 

However, adult influence may also be a factor. When researchers invite children into a room containing a novel object, they find that children are very attuned to the feedback of adults. When the experimenter makes encouraging faces or comments, children are more likely to explore the interesting object. Experiments I've done show that children show much more interest in materials when an adult visibly shows how curious he or she is about the materials. In other words, children's curiosity can be fostered or squelched by the people they spend time with. 

Although it's hard to discourage the investigations of a 2-year-old, it's all too easy to discourage those of 7-, 11-, or 15-year-olds. In one classroom I observed, a 9th grader raised her hand to ask if there were any places in the world where no one made art. The teacher stopped her midsentence with, "Zoe, no questions now, please; it's time for learning." 

Often the ways in which teachers unwittingly discourage curiosity are much subtler. By the same token, teachers can also encourage curiosity in subtle ways. One teacher I've observed often begins sentences to her students with the phrase, "Let's see what happens." She's showing them the value of finding things out.

The Independent Project

Inspiration, hunger: these are the forces that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is create the most likely conditions for them to flourish and then get out of their way.

-Ted Sizer

True accountability would demand that we ask children if they like school; then we would have to care about their answer - and be prepared to do something about it.

Where interest lies; achievement follows. 

Susan Engel puts it this way:

You can't achieve the broader goals of making people into readers, making people love ideas, love conversation, love knowledge, want to get good at things, if you don't make school a place where kids want to be.

For more on how high school can be less about the system's needs and more about student's needs, check out The Independent Project:

Scientifically Tested Tests

The New York Times featured a brilliant article by Susan Engel on September 19. She wrote eloquently about rethinking assessment. 

Her main points are worthy of serious reflection:

• why are we so hell-bent on census testing when we could be assessing samples of students?
• why do we continue to use such limited assessment formats such as multiple choice?
• why do we continue to stress the importance of such limited measurements when there is good reason to believe that some of the worse teachers successfully hide behind such narrow goals and rigid scripts?
• why do we subscribe to such a behaviourist's approach of rewarding and punishing schools based on test scores that tend to conceal more than they reveal?
• if even a fraction of these questions have validity, then the real question is cui bono? Who benefits from the use of such limited measurements?

As much as I love to ask challenging questions, I can see the merit in offering up probable solutions, and this is exactly what I love so much about Susan Engel's article. She provides a number of substitutes to traditional, fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests:

Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.

This task is not as difficult as one might think. In recent years, psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle as the forces that govern our moral choices and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping. And many promising techniques already used by child development experts could provide a starting point for improving school assessments.

For instance, using recordings of children’s everyday speech, developmental psychologists can calculate two important indicators of intellectual functioning: the grammatical complexity of their sentences and the size of their working vocabularies (not the words they circle during a test, but the ones they use in their real lives). Why not do the same in schools? We could even employ a written version, analyzing random samples of children’s essays and stories.

Psychologists have also found that a good way to measure a person’s literacy level is to test his ability to identify the names of actual authors amid the names of non-authors. In other words, someone who knows that Mark Twain and J. K. Rowling are published authors — and that, say, Robert Sponge is not — reads more. We could periodically administer such a test to children to find out how much they have read as opposed to which isolated skills they have been practicing for a test.

When children recount a story that they have read or that has been read to them, it provides all kinds of information about their narrative skill, an essential component of literacy. We could give students a book and then have them talk with a trained examiner about what they read; the oral reconstruction could be analyzed for evidence of their narrative comprehension.

Researchers have also found that the way a student critiques a simple science experiment shows whether he understands the idea of controlling variables, a key component in all science work. To assess children’s scientific skills, an experiment could be described to them, in writing, and then they would explain how they would improve upon it.

Of course, these new assessments could include some paper-and-pencil work as well. But that work would have to measure students’ thinking skills, not whether they can select a right answer from preset options. For instance, children could write essays in response to a prompt like, “Choose something you are good at, and describe to your reader how you do it.” That would allow each student to draw on his area of expertise, show his ability to analyze the process, describe a task logically and convey real information and substance. In turn, a prompt of, “Write a description of yourself from your mother’s point of view,” would help gauge the child’s ability to understand the perspectives of others.