The spark of curiosity

Every child has the right to a quality education, but too often what is missing in school classrooms is the spark of curiosity, which can stimulate male and female students to learn. In a world where more and more boys and girls attend schools in developing countries, the growing rate of school participation does not always translate into satisfactory learning outcomes.

A recent study published in the prestigious American economics journal, American Economic Review, analyzed this "participation-performance" educational dilemma. More specifically, the authors examined the link between curiosity and learning, evaluating the impact of an innovative approach aimed at increasing the quality of education.

The survey highlights the challenges faced in education in developing countries, underlining its low quality due to poor teacher preparation, overcrowded classes and lack of adequate teaching materials. However, instead of focusing only on the problems, the authors propose an innovative solution: cultivating children's curiosity as the key to significantly improving learning.

The heart of this innovative program is pedagogy: how we teach is just as important as what we teach. The teachers involved in this pedagogical program have learned to create an engaging learning environment, which is able to stimulate curiosity and is capable of adapting to the individual needs of male and female students. Based on recent discoveries on the neural dynamics of human curiosity, this program focuses mainly on science teaching in elementary schools and offers teachers specific training in teaching practices based on identifying and using the natural inclination of boys and girls to facilitate learning. The program was implemented in two large-scale randomized controlled trials in two Turkish provinces, involving 134 primary schools, 425 teachers and approximately 11 thousand children aged between 9 and 11.

The results of the program were significant. The male and female students involved in this experimental program achieved higher scores on science tests, demonstrating that curiosity can act as a catalyst for deep learning. What is even more surprising is that this positive effect is long-lasting: positive results are found even during school closures during the pandemic.
Of course, how to measure curiosity is a complex question, but the program introduced an innovative method for this purpose: an incentive-based task. To evaluate the impact of the program, the authors developed a behavioral measure that quantifies curiosity through the desire of boys and girls to have information that arouses their curiosity. The people involved in this program have in fact shown a greater inclination to receive this type of information and to retain this knowledge for a prolonged period. The study not only highlighted a change in their attitudes, but also showed how curiosity can promote information sharing among students themselves.

In a world where the quality of education is crucial to the future of entire nations, programs like this suggest that stimulating children's curiosity is not just a way to improve learning outcomes, but also an opportunity to transform the way we teach and learn.

This applies to every level of education: exploring the world through the lens of curiosity can allow everyone to unlock their learning potential, which very often remains crushed by highly standardized teaching routines .


Pierluigi Conzo
NP January 2024