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Is Curiosity Vanishing?
EDITORIAL
Is Curiosity Vanishing? SUSAN ENGEL, PH.D.
‘‘Curiouser and curiouser!’’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). VAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 Childhood is filled with curiosity. Toddlers open every door; ask as many as 100 ‘‘why’’ questions in a day; and want to touch, smell, taste, and hear each new object they encounter. Many parents encourage this kind of investigation, implicitly understanding that it is not only appealing but key to their children’s well-being. Like toddlers, preschoolers are determined experimentalists, testing hypotheses, exploring new environments, and figuring out how things work. Their need to resolve uncertainty and explain the unexpected is the engine of early cognitive development. One of the vital functions of play is to provide children with a framework within which to explore and master experiences they do not fully understand. Similarly, children tell stories as a way of figuring out everyday experiences that seem exciting, mysterious, scary, and unknown. In other words, young children spend a large portion of their day engaging in activities well suited to satisfying their curiosity. As Adam Phillips says, in describing Freud’s insight about the ubiquity and power of a child’s curiosity, ‘‘He is addicted to, driven by, what he doesn’t know.’’1 However, is curiosity good for children? Many adults have an implicit mistrust of children’s curiosity. It is possible this stems from a deep-seated wariness of children’s wildness and propensity for getting into trouble: Anna Freud famously suggested that if you put a toddler on a street corner in Cambridge, she would commit every crime known to mankind by the time she found her way to Harvard Square. Common fables (such as Pandora’s Box) and folk sayings
Accepted February 3, 2009. Schuyler W. Henderson, M.D., served as assistant editor for this editorial. Dr. Engel is with Williams College. Correspondence to Susan Engel, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Williams College, 18 Hoxsey Street, Williamstown, MA 01267; e-mail: Susan.engel@ williams.edu. 0890-8567/09/4808-0777Ó2009 by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1097/CHI.0b013e3181aa03b0
J. AM . ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCH IAT RY, 48:8, AUGUST 2009
(such as ‘‘curiosity killed the cat’’) embody our collective sense that curiosity can be explosive and subversive. However, research confirms that curiosity is neither dangerous nor merely adorableVbut instead is necessary to a child’s intellectual growth. Children learn more, remember longer, and are more interested in pursuing a topic when the activity or material sparks their curiosity and when they are provided opportunities to find answers to their questions.2 Many adults, who may be unconsciously wary of children’s probing, acknowledge its value and assume its prevalence. When asked, parents say that they want school to encourage their child’s curiosity, and teachers are quick to agree that a spirit of inquiry is essential to their classroom. In one study, teachers were asked to choose from a list of 25 terms, the 5 skills or qualities they sought to encourage or cultivate in their grade school classrooms. An overwhelming majority circled curiosity. When parents of kindergarteners and fifth graders were interviewed about their children’s daily interests and activities, more than 65% mentioned their child’s curiosity. They implicitly felt that curiosity was an important and pervasive characteristic, one which they, as parents, nurtured.3 Although adults assume that childhood is a phase of life in which curiosity predominates, the reality is somewhat more complicated, especially when children begin to attend school. CURIOSITY IN SCHOOLS
British researchers Tizard and Hughes followed toddlers as they made the transition from home to school. Whereas they observed many exchanges in which parents encouraged their children to express and satisfy their curiosity at home, the researchers observed almost no similar exchanges with teachers once the children got to school.4 An observational study of kindergarten and fifth grade classrooms in the United States found that children express little curiosity at school.3 We looked at 10 classrooms in 5 public schools for a period of 3 months and found that the average number of episodes where a child actively expressed curiosity in any given 2-hour stretch ranged from a high of 5.2 to a low of zero. Nine of the classrooms had more than one 2-hour stretch without even one expression of curiosity.
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777
ENGEL
What might account for the infrequency of curiosity found in classrooms? One possibility is that as children enter the middle childhood years, they simply become less curious. However, the data do not support such a view. All through middle childhood, children express curiosity when they have access to materials that interest them and encouragement from adults to explore and investigate. A more likely explanation of the scarcity of expressed curiosity is that adults are not encouraging inquiry. Because of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2001 and promotes standards-based teaching, most teachers are under pressure to teach specific skills and information and to keep their lessons on a tight schedule. In addition, many teachers work in underfunded school. Finally, families vary greatly in how much they support their children’s efforts to express and satisfy curiosity. As we looked at this issue more closely, we sought to understand the ways in which teachers do and do not encourage curiosity. Teachers often deflect students’ questions by reminding them to stay on task. For instance, consider two kindergarten children sitting at a table tracing letters on a worksheet. At some point, they pause in their tracing and began to look at some Popsicle sticks that had been lying on the table and on which were printed short simple riddles. The two girls begin trying to decipher the words on the Popsicle sticks, at which point the teacher, who is also sitting at the table, helping another child, put the sticks in her pocket saying ‘‘Let’s put these away for now, so you can finish your letters.’’ Teachers often discourage unscripted inquiry in the interests of getting through a mandated curriculum. Although most teachers frequently ask their students questions, many of these are aimed at finding out what students know, rather than extending a child’s question or promoting further inquiry into a topic. Some teachers provide lively hands-on activities and ask open-ended questions to accompany the activity, For instance, in one example from our experimental data, a teacher brought in a clear plastic bag holding some fish and encouraged the children to make guesses about what kind of fish were in the bag, what their habits were, and how they might behave when put into the aquarium. Although such an interaction elicits richer questions from the teacher, it does not necessarily stimulate many questions from the children: This illustrates an important but easily overlooked distinction between children’s engagement and children’s curiosity. Most of the time, teachers have specific objectives for each stretch of time in the classroom and spend a great deal of effort keeping children on task, working toward those objectives. Mastery rather than inquiry is often the dominant goal. This may well have more to do with the demands placed on teachers by the state and by school administrators, rather than anything intrinsic to the people who teach. In one study,
778
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we found that a slight shift in instructions given to the teachers (emphasizing understanding within a domain rather than completion of a worksheet) led them to encourage children’s curiosity.5 In other words, when teachers are provided the conditions for encouraging curiosity, they are more than ready to do so. WHAT CHILDREN WANT TO KNOW
Although research has shown a surprising paucity of expressed curiosity in contemporary classrooms, naturalistic data have provided interesting clues about the topics that elicit children’s curiosity and the ways in which curiosity unfolds when it is expressed. Children are curious about a wide range of phenomena, often finding objects or topics in the world around them as starting points for further exploration. Somewhat surprisingly, children do not seem to engage in extended exploration of their physical world in school. On the other hand, they are interested in their teachersVmany elementary school-aged children participate in extended discussions that begin when a teacher says something about his or her personal life, such as describing an event from the teacher’s childhood. Children’s curiosity is often sparked by the introduction of abstract concepts like why some people do not believe in God. However, what particularly piques their curiosity are exotic and unknown ideas, like foreign places such as the Bering Straits, or the Amazonian jungle. Children also express curiosity about places and ideas they encounter in pictures. For instance, one kindergarten student asked why there was an ‘‘A’’ next to the names of some of the children on an attendance sheet on the wall, which led to a discussion of what it means to be ‘‘Absent.’’ It is not unusual for a child to ask a question about something the teacher has presented. For instance, in one kindergarten class, a teacher is reading a story about plants. The child points with his finger to an illustration saying, ‘‘Are Venus fly traps really alive? Do they really catch?’’ Children also express curiosity when they are not in teacher-directed activities, whether alone or with friends. These expressions of interest are often about topics and events that are peripheral to the curriculum. Such exchanges seem to occur on the margins of the daily school activities. For instance, one little boy in a kindergarten classroom is milling around during a free play period. He stops and looks at a globe, turning it a few times. Then, he says out loud, to no one in particular, ‘‘Is it possible to survive on Antarctica?’’ FOSTERING CURIOSITY
It is clear that children feel curiosity and, under certain circumstances, try to satisfy that curiosity with new information. So, what can be done to bring inquiry into the daily lives of our school children?
J. AM. AC AD. C HILD AD OLESC. PSYCHIATRY, 48:8 , AUGUST 2009
EDITORIAL
The most obvious solution is to provide children with the kinds of topics, activities, and materials that seem to engage them. Research suggests that this includes the lives of those they care about (one another and their teachers) as well as pictures and narratives about unfamiliar places and events. However, this is only a first step. Curiosity is not simply engagement per se but a way of questioning things that requires unscripted interactions and an ability to follow a line of inquiry into unknown places, to see where it goes, and to see what happens. Curiosity is not merely the natural byproduct of a friendly or flexible classroom. It needs to be actively encouraged and valued in ways that are visible to children. Putting curiosity at the center of the education process begins with teacher training. Education programs must provide young teachers with the chance to pursue and expand their own curiosity and help them understand the vital importance of this process so that they can in turn cultivate it in their students. The role of teachers in shaping children is paramount; current research suggests that teachers rethink their approach
J. AM . ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCH IAT RY, 48:8, AUGUST 2009
to fostering curiosity in children. Furthermore, advocates on behalf of children’s development will need to reconsider the role of school systems and education laws in either constraining or encouraging curiosity. This will require a frank look at how much curiosity is to be encouraged, why it is or is not being encouraged, and what must be done to promote it. Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. REFERENCES 1. Phillips Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. London: Vintage Press; 1999. 2. Renninger KA, Hidi S, Krapp A. The Role of Interest in Learning and Development. New Jersey: LEA Press; 1992. 3. Engel S. (2006) Open Pandora_s Box: Curiosity in the Classroom, The Sarah Lawrence Child Development Institute Occasional Papers. http:// www.slc.edu/cdi/Occasional_Paper_Engel.php. Accessed January 5, 2009. 4. Tizard B, Hughes M. Young Children Learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1984. 5. Engel S, Randall K. (2008) How Teachers_ Respond to Children_s Inquiry American Educational Research Journal. http://aerj.aera.net. Accessed October 7, 2008.
WWW.JAACAP.COM
779
Is Curiosity Vanishing? SUSAN ENGEL, PH.D.
‘‘Curiouser and curiouser!’’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). VAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 Childhood is filled with curiosity. Toddlers open every door; ask as many as 100 ‘‘why’’ questions in a day; and want to touch, smell, taste, and hear each new object they encounter. Many parents encourage this kind of investigation, implicitly understanding that it is not only appealing but key to their children’s well-being. Like toddlers, preschoolers are determined experimentalists, testing hypotheses, exploring new environments, and figuring out how things work. Their need to resolve uncertainty and explain the unexpected is the engine of early cognitive development. One of the vital functions of play is to provide children with a framework within which to explore and master experiences they do not fully understand. Similarly, children tell stories as a way of figuring out everyday experiences that seem exciting, mysterious, scary, and unknown. In other words, young children spend a large portion of their day engaging in activities well suited to satisfying their curiosity. As Adam Phillips says, in describing Freud’s insight about the ubiquity and power of a child’s curiosity, ‘‘He is addicted to, driven by, what he doesn’t know.’’1 However, is curiosity good for children? Many adults have an implicit mistrust of children’s curiosity. It is possible this stems from a deep-seated wariness of children’s wildness and propensity for getting into trouble: Anna Freud famously suggested that if you put a toddler on a street corner in Cambridge, she would commit every crime known to mankind by the time she found her way to Harvard Square. Common fables (such as Pandora’s Box) and folk sayings
Accepted February 3, 2009. Schuyler W. Henderson, M.D., served as assistant editor for this editorial. Dr. Engel is with Williams College. Correspondence to Susan Engel, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Williams College, 18 Hoxsey Street, Williamstown, MA 01267; e-mail: Susan.engel@ williams.edu. 0890-8567/09/4808-0777Ó2009 by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1097/CHI.0b013e3181aa03b0
J. AM . ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCH IAT RY, 48:8, AUGUST 2009
(such as ‘‘curiosity killed the cat’’) embody our collective sense that curiosity can be explosive and subversive. However, research confirms that curiosity is neither dangerous nor merely adorableVbut instead is necessary to a child’s intellectual growth. Children learn more, remember longer, and are more interested in pursuing a topic when the activity or material sparks their curiosity and when they are provided opportunities to find answers to their questions.2 Many adults, who may be unconsciously wary of children’s probing, acknowledge its value and assume its prevalence. When asked, parents say that they want school to encourage their child’s curiosity, and teachers are quick to agree that a spirit of inquiry is essential to their classroom. In one study, teachers were asked to choose from a list of 25 terms, the 5 skills or qualities they sought to encourage or cultivate in their grade school classrooms. An overwhelming majority circled curiosity. When parents of kindergarteners and fifth graders were interviewed about their children’s daily interests and activities, more than 65% mentioned their child’s curiosity. They implicitly felt that curiosity was an important and pervasive characteristic, one which they, as parents, nurtured.3 Although adults assume that childhood is a phase of life in which curiosity predominates, the reality is somewhat more complicated, especially when children begin to attend school. CURIOSITY IN SCHOOLS
British researchers Tizard and Hughes followed toddlers as they made the transition from home to school. Whereas they observed many exchanges in which parents encouraged their children to express and satisfy their curiosity at home, the researchers observed almost no similar exchanges with teachers once the children got to school.4 An observational study of kindergarten and fifth grade classrooms in the United States found that children express little curiosity at school.3 We looked at 10 classrooms in 5 public schools for a period of 3 months and found that the average number of episodes where a child actively expressed curiosity in any given 2-hour stretch ranged from a high of 5.2 to a low of zero. Nine of the classrooms had more than one 2-hour stretch without even one expression of curiosity.
WWW.JAACAP.COM
777
ENGEL
What might account for the infrequency of curiosity found in classrooms? One possibility is that as children enter the middle childhood years, they simply become less curious. However, the data do not support such a view. All through middle childhood, children express curiosity when they have access to materials that interest them and encouragement from adults to explore and investigate. A more likely explanation of the scarcity of expressed curiosity is that adults are not encouraging inquiry. Because of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2001 and promotes standards-based teaching, most teachers are under pressure to teach specific skills and information and to keep their lessons on a tight schedule. In addition, many teachers work in underfunded school. Finally, families vary greatly in how much they support their children’s efforts to express and satisfy curiosity. As we looked at this issue more closely, we sought to understand the ways in which teachers do and do not encourage curiosity. Teachers often deflect students’ questions by reminding them to stay on task. For instance, consider two kindergarten children sitting at a table tracing letters on a worksheet. At some point, they pause in their tracing and began to look at some Popsicle sticks that had been lying on the table and on which were printed short simple riddles. The two girls begin trying to decipher the words on the Popsicle sticks, at which point the teacher, who is also sitting at the table, helping another child, put the sticks in her pocket saying ‘‘Let’s put these away for now, so you can finish your letters.’’ Teachers often discourage unscripted inquiry in the interests of getting through a mandated curriculum. Although most teachers frequently ask their students questions, many of these are aimed at finding out what students know, rather than extending a child’s question or promoting further inquiry into a topic. Some teachers provide lively hands-on activities and ask open-ended questions to accompany the activity, For instance, in one example from our experimental data, a teacher brought in a clear plastic bag holding some fish and encouraged the children to make guesses about what kind of fish were in the bag, what their habits were, and how they might behave when put into the aquarium. Although such an interaction elicits richer questions from the teacher, it does not necessarily stimulate many questions from the children: This illustrates an important but easily overlooked distinction between children’s engagement and children’s curiosity. Most of the time, teachers have specific objectives for each stretch of time in the classroom and spend a great deal of effort keeping children on task, working toward those objectives. Mastery rather than inquiry is often the dominant goal. This may well have more to do with the demands placed on teachers by the state and by school administrators, rather than anything intrinsic to the people who teach. In one study,
778
WWW.JAACAP.COM
we found that a slight shift in instructions given to the teachers (emphasizing understanding within a domain rather than completion of a worksheet) led them to encourage children’s curiosity.5 In other words, when teachers are provided the conditions for encouraging curiosity, they are more than ready to do so. WHAT CHILDREN WANT TO KNOW
Although research has shown a surprising paucity of expressed curiosity in contemporary classrooms, naturalistic data have provided interesting clues about the topics that elicit children’s curiosity and the ways in which curiosity unfolds when it is expressed. Children are curious about a wide range of phenomena, often finding objects or topics in the world around them as starting points for further exploration. Somewhat surprisingly, children do not seem to engage in extended exploration of their physical world in school. On the other hand, they are interested in their teachersVmany elementary school-aged children participate in extended discussions that begin when a teacher says something about his or her personal life, such as describing an event from the teacher’s childhood. Children’s curiosity is often sparked by the introduction of abstract concepts like why some people do not believe in God. However, what particularly piques their curiosity are exotic and unknown ideas, like foreign places such as the Bering Straits, or the Amazonian jungle. Children also express curiosity about places and ideas they encounter in pictures. For instance, one kindergarten student asked why there was an ‘‘A’’ next to the names of some of the children on an attendance sheet on the wall, which led to a discussion of what it means to be ‘‘Absent.’’ It is not unusual for a child to ask a question about something the teacher has presented. For instance, in one kindergarten class, a teacher is reading a story about plants. The child points with his finger to an illustration saying, ‘‘Are Venus fly traps really alive? Do they really catch?’’ Children also express curiosity when they are not in teacher-directed activities, whether alone or with friends. These expressions of interest are often about topics and events that are peripheral to the curriculum. Such exchanges seem to occur on the margins of the daily school activities. For instance, one little boy in a kindergarten classroom is milling around during a free play period. He stops and looks at a globe, turning it a few times. Then, he says out loud, to no one in particular, ‘‘Is it possible to survive on Antarctica?’’ FOSTERING CURIOSITY
It is clear that children feel curiosity and, under certain circumstances, try to satisfy that curiosity with new information. So, what can be done to bring inquiry into the daily lives of our school children?
J. AM. AC AD. C HILD AD OLESC. PSYCHIATRY, 48:8 , AUGUST 2009
EDITORIAL
The most obvious solution is to provide children with the kinds of topics, activities, and materials that seem to engage them. Research suggests that this includes the lives of those they care about (one another and their teachers) as well as pictures and narratives about unfamiliar places and events. However, this is only a first step. Curiosity is not simply engagement per se but a way of questioning things that requires unscripted interactions and an ability to follow a line of inquiry into unknown places, to see where it goes, and to see what happens. Curiosity is not merely the natural byproduct of a friendly or flexible classroom. It needs to be actively encouraged and valued in ways that are visible to children. Putting curiosity at the center of the education process begins with teacher training. Education programs must provide young teachers with the chance to pursue and expand their own curiosity and help them understand the vital importance of this process so that they can in turn cultivate it in their students. The role of teachers in shaping children is paramount; current research suggests that teachers rethink their approach
J. AM . ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCH IAT RY, 48:8, AUGUST 2009
to fostering curiosity in children. Furthermore, advocates on behalf of children’s development will need to reconsider the role of school systems and education laws in either constraining or encouraging curiosity. This will require a frank look at how much curiosity is to be encouraged, why it is or is not being encouraged, and what must be done to promote it. Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. REFERENCES 1. Phillips Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. London: Vintage Press; 1999. 2. Renninger KA, Hidi S, Krapp A. The Role of Interest in Learning and Development. New Jersey: LEA Press; 1992. 3. Engel S. (2006) Open Pandora_s Box: Curiosity in the Classroom, The Sarah Lawrence Child Development Institute Occasional Papers. http:// www.slc.edu/cdi/Occasional_Paper_Engel.php. Accessed January 5, 2009. 4. Tizard B, Hughes M. Young Children Learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1984. 5. Engel S, Randall K. (2008) How Teachers_ Respond to Children_s Inquiry American Educational Research Journal. http://aerj.aera.net. Accessed October 7, 2008.
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779