New study looks at what really sparks curiosity and learning

BY LORY HOUGH

From Ed. Harvard ED. Magazine

What happens to learning and curiosity when some children are encouraged to ask questions and others to sit and listen carefully? That’s what Associate Professor Elizabeth Bonawitz wanted to find out with a team of other educators and scientists when they followed 103 children, ages 5 to 7, as they participated in a series of virtual science lessons over a two-week period. What they found, as detailed in a new paper published this summer, is that while curiosity might kill the cat, it actually helps children learn more — and value what they’re learning. This past fall, Bonawitz spoke to Ed. about asking and listening, willingness-to-pay, and the million-dollar question.

One group was encouraged to ask questions and the other to listen carefully, correct?

Exactly. Before the first lesson, the child was told the purpose of the lessons, depending on which group they had been randomly assigned to before the study started. We told children: “I want you to get really good at [asking questions/ listening carefully]. [Question asking/careful listening] is super important because [asking questions/listening] is an amazing way to learn about new, cool things! [Question asking/listening closely] is a great skill for you to use in school, and I want us to have a goal of becoming really good [question askers/listeners] so that we can be some of the best learners in the future!” This goal was reaffirmed at the start of each subsequent lesson.

What were the students learning about?

Each child had 10 different online sessions with us, so we saw them every day for two weeks. The topic lessons were designed to be consistent with the United States’ Next Generation Science Standards for kindergarten, so they included topics like animal hibernation, camouflage, and building homes. Each lesson consisted of three parts: a story from a book, a video, and an activity. For example, in the animal-plant systems lesson, child-teacher pairs read a story about honeybee homes, watched a video about how bees make honey, and then made “honey” themselves with cornstarch and water.

How did you measure what they learned?

A new experimenter, who didn’t know which intervention the children had been assigned, tested children on their content knowledge from the training — both information that was directly taught and generalized knowledge that they might have developed. They also showed children a new picture of an animal and asked them how many questions they could think of to ask about it. Finally, we gave children a generalized measure of science curiosity called “willingness- to-pay”; we showed them a picture of a video they could watch and asked if they wanted some stickers or to watch the video. If they wanted to watch the video, we increased the “pot” of stickers until they switched to preferring the stickers. If they wanted the stickers, we decreased the “pot” until they switched to preferring the video. This gave us a “value” measure children put on new science information (the video).

What did you learn?

I was expecting children in the question training to ask a lot more questions in the follow-up task and was hoping they might show some improvement of knowledge and some improvement of generalized curiosity/interest in science content as measured by the “willingness-to-pay” task. We did not see strong evidence that the question asking training taught children to simply ask more questions: Children in the question-asking condition did not ask more questions about a novel animal than children in the listening condition. However, we found a whopping effect on “willingness-to-pay.” Children in the question-asking training were willing to pay many more stickers for new science content than children in the careful listening condition. We also found that children in the question-asking condition gained marginally more science knowledge than the careful listeners. Furthermore, practice with question-asking was more beneficial for children with lower baseline knowledge, suggesting that question-asking shows promise for enhancing children’s motivation to learn and equalizing academic disparities.

Full story here

Source: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/22/11/it-better-ask-questions-or-listen-carefully