How Curiosity Can Unlock Learning for Every Child

Curiosity is one of our most powerful, yet often overlooked, human drives, especially in education. Associate Professor Elizabeth Bonawitz explains that while there’s no single definition of curiosity, it’s best understood as an internal desire to resolve gaps in our knowledge or a wondering about how the world works. That innate drive begins in infancy, fueling our rapid early learning. But as children grow older, especially within structured school systems, that spark too often dims.

Through her research, Bonawitz explores how curiosity operates like mise en place for learning preparing the mind to absorb, connect, and retain new information. It activates attention, memory, and motivation, setting the stage for deeper understanding. Studies from her lab show that simple practices, like encouraging children to ask more questions, not only increase curiosity but also improve learning outcomes.

“Children who are more curious do better in math or reading scores in school. And that's particularly true for students that come from more under-resourced communities or students that might have other challenges associated with school,” Bonawitz says. “So, curiosity is the great equalizer for education.”

But curiosity is not the easiest thing to cultivate, especially in a classroom where barriers like test driven school structures and cultural differences tied to uncertainty. The good news is there are things educators and even parents can do to help foster that curiosity. 

In this episode, the EdCast takes a deeper look at curiosity and explores ways to home in on what she considers the simple act of wonder.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

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Elizabeth Bonawitz believes curiosity is one of the most powerful drivers of human learning. But to truly harness it, we need to better understand what curiosity is and how to nurture it in children and schools. 

As a Harvard professor, she studies how curiosity shapes the way we explore, ask questions, and make sense of the world. It's one of the most essential ingredients of learning. Yet it's not always easy for educators to cultivate in classrooms where structure and freedom often pull in opposite directions. 

I wanted to know more about what fuels curiosity and how teachers and even parents can create environments where wonder thrives. I started by asking Elizabeth, how do you define curiosity and learning?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: There's actually not a widely accepted definition of curiosity. So, some people define curiosity in terms of the behaviors that we see. So, when children ask questions or explore more, those are behaviors that reflect curiosity. That's challenging because those behaviors can also come about for other reasons, not motivated by internal curiosity. So maybe I'm exploring more because I think it's going to be fun or I'm going to get a reward. Or maybe I'm asking more questions because I've been taught that I'm supposed to ask questions, but not because I've got that internal motivation. So, another way to define curiosity is that sort of internal drive to resolve some gap in your knowledge.

So, I think about curiosity in terms of our wondering about the world, our ability to want to understand how things work and why they work the way they do. And so, when I talk about curiosity, I'm usually talking about what's called epistemic curiosity. So, the wondering about how things work. And that comes from this internal drive from our own mind to try to reconcile how the world works, why it's working the way it does.

JILL ANDERSON: I'm sure you get asked this all the time, but are some children naturally more curious than others, or is curiosity a skill that can be developed with the right support?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: That's a great and hard question. So, I think actually, we don't have great empirical answers to this. So, I think we don't know from the science entirely the right answer to that question. I think that we have intuitions that all children are born curious. That's part of what makes human learning as rich and rapid as it is. So, we learn a lot from very limited amounts of data very quickly, and that's partly driven by our own internal desire, even from infancy, to try to figure out how the world works. So that's a core mechanism that our mind already has set up. So, everyone has curiosity. Then there's a question about whether or not there's differences in individuals. I suspect that there are. And there's different ways in which you can experience curiosity. So, you could be someone who's always curious about things all the time. You could be somebody who when they're curious experiences it very intensely. So, I suddenly feel strongly curious as opposed to someone who feels weakly curious. Or you could be somebody who's triggered easily by things that might create a curiosity or information gap that makes you want to resolve something. So, there's a different kinds of ways that curiosity can come about. And you might have people whose profiles look a little different. Maybe I'm someone who's always metacognitively thinking, should I wonder about this? And thus, I feel curiosity a lot. But when I feel curiosity, I'm not like overwhelmed by it. Or maybe I'm somebody. when I feel curiosity, I feel very strongly towards curiosity. 

So, there's ways in which you could imagine temperamental differences. But we actually don't have good ways of measuring that empirically, which then adds to this question of, well, how do we know if we're increasing curiosity in an individual? Are there things that we can do that make children more curious or at least allow them to continue that innate, natural curiosity? There's data that's out there that suggests there's things that we can do that at least boost those curiosity behaviors. And maybe those are things that are also changing that sort of internal experience of curiosity, whether it's more often or it's felt more intensely. But we don't have great definitive answers to that question yet.

JILL ANDERSON: So how much do we know about how valuable something like curiosity is when it comes to learning?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: Curiosity is extremely valuable for learning. One of the things that I have argued in my own work is that when you're preparing a meal, sometimes you think about let's get the stage set. There's something called mise en place. You want to get all of your ingredients together ahead of time so that you're ready to cook. And one of the ways I think about curiosity is that it's that mise en place for learning. It's preparing the mind and the brain to be ready to get new information. So, your reward systems are starting to fire up, your memory systems are starting to fire up, and you're ready to be attentive and to pay attention to something. 

So that's helping you when you get information figure out how to coordinate it with other memories, with other information you already have, how to feel rewarded from that information, and then helping you encode that information. So, curiosity is the physiological state that helps support learning right in that moment. 

We know from other kinds of empirical studies that curiosity also relates to school outcomes. And so, children who are more curious do better in math or reading scores in school. And that's particularly true for students that come from more under-resourced communities or students that might have other challenges associated with school. So curiosity is the great equalizer for education.

So kids coming in from lower resourced resource backgrounds, if they're more curious, they're more likely to have higher math and reading scores in education. So that's another sort of link at a broad level between curiosity and learning and education, and then also at the specific mind level, we think that there are these links between that feeling of curiosity and learning.

JILL ANDERSON: It feels like curiosity is a real game changer for kids and for education. But figuring out how do we foster curiosity in all kids might be a challenge.

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: It's a challenge for three reasons. One reason why it's a challenge is because we're still trying to figure out how to have good measures of curiosity. The second reason why it's a challenge to figure out how to foster curiosity is because I think that the way our school systems are set up are sometimes not always conducive to creating opportunities for children to explore their own interests and to ask questions that are things that we know about curiosity.

And a third reason why it's challenging is I think that more and more in our society, and particularly in the United States, we're not celebrating skills that are associated with curiosity, for example, intellectual humility, so the idea that it's OK to not know something. It's OK to not have an answer to something. 

And in fact, we want to celebrate those moments where we're sort of uncertain, where we're like, huh, I don't know how that works. If we don't recognize that in ourselves and we don't celebrate those opportunities, then we're not modeling it for children as well.

And so that's another thing that I think is really important for children to see early in development but that make it challenging to figure out how are we going to foster this. We've got our own home environments and our society and cultural expectations that are working against curiosity. We've got the structure of the school day that's working against it. And then from a practical level, it's just challenging as researchers to study it, measure it.

JILL ANDERSON: I feel like young kids, in particular, especially in the early elementary years, they seem so curious. You ask them if they have a question. They always have questions. But then as you see kids going through the school system, it almost feels like that starts to shut down in some ways and kids become disengaged. I'm wondering, how do you see curiosity as a piece of the puzzle in learning?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: That's a great question. So, it's definitely true. Anyone who's a parent out there has the experience of their three, four, five-year-old insatiably, but why? But why? So, the constant questions that are coming, and it's so delightful to watch those children that are so excited. 

And as the children start getting older, you don't see as many opportunities for kids to be but why, but why, especially in school. So, there are studies that suggest that children show less and less interest and curiosity towards school. By the time they're fourth or fifth grade, that curiosity, as measured in school settings, has really dropped off.

Now there's a question about what they're curious about. So, I suspect, for example, if you asked an 11 or 12-year-old if they're curious about who their friend likes best or some other kind of social interaction, those kids are really curious about that. So, it depends on what you're measuring, whether you're measuring curiosity about school content or curiosity, say, about social.

I think that this idea that blanketly curiosity is just diminishing in childhood is something that we have to be careful about because it's not clear that all kinds of curiosity are diminishing. Nonetheless, we probably really care about making sure that children maintain a love of learning and a love of learning the kind of content that's happening in schools.

The one thing we found in our own lab is that you can actually promote curiosity and promote learning through relatively simple interventions. So, we studied preschool and kindergarten children, and we actually had two different groups of children. So, one group of children, we gave them science content. We met one on one with children over the course of two weeks, 10 times each child. And we gave them lots of science content that they learned about animals, and camouflage, and different kinds of things that were age appropriate. And one group of children we told to ask as many questions as they wanted as we were teaching them about this content. Go ahead, ask questions. You're doing a great job asking questions, giving them positive feedback. A different group of children, we told them to listen carefully, to pay close attention. Oh, you're doing a really good job paying close attention. You're listening really carefully. That's great. And at the end of those two weeks, we measured children's learning of the material, and we also measured their curiosity about new science content. So, we gave them a choice of watching a video about a tiger or a dolphin, whatever they are most excited about. And then we said, look, you can either watch this video about a tiger, or we'll give you three stickers. And we said, do the children want a prize, or do they want to watch the video? And if they said they wanted to watch the video, we upped the ante. We said, what if it was four stickers. What if it was five stickers?

So, we basically got a measure of how much they valued this new science content. So that's a measure of curiosity. How much are they willing to pay to learn something new? And what we found is that for the children who practice asking lots of questions over the course of those two weeks, those children, they're more willing to pay, give more stickers to learn new science information than children who were told to pay close attention. And those children who were encouraged to ask more questions also learned more. They learned more of the content. Effect was particularly strong for children who initially tested with lower verbal readiness scores, lower attentional scores, and so children who had these markers that might otherwise put them at risk for succeeding in school, that curiosity training — the question asking training really had a profound impact on those kids.

So, it shows us both that there's a link between curiosity and learning, that curiosity is supporting learning, but also that link is really important, and particularly might be a great equalizer for students who are coming in from maybe under-resourced backgrounds or backgrounds where they're not as otherwise prepared for school. So that felt like a great initial study to suggest this really simple thing we can do, encourage children to ask more questions, can make them more curious, can help them learn more. And in particularly, it works really well for students that otherwise might have lower school readiness scores.

JILL ANDERSON: Can you tell me some simple strategies parents and teachers can use to just nurture curiosity in kids?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: Oh, that's a great question. So, from that study, one of the simple strategies, I think, is allowing children to ask questions and getting them to think about their own uncertainty. 

So, asking questions is good, partly because children are recognizing that they don't know something. And that's very important to then boost learning and further curiosity. It's training what we'd call metacognition, so being able to reason about your own reasoning.

But also, it's just demonstrating the importance of following your own interests and the kinds of rewards that you get from wondering. Like when you get an answer to a question, that feels really good. And so that's a great reinforcement. So, getting children to ask questions is really important.

As parents and educators, modeling curiosity is also really important, showing kids that it's OK to not know, that it's OK to ask questions, and that you yourself have questions all the time. And it's a great opportunity to learn something when you're not sure about something.

So, when children see that is a culturally acceptable thing and not only acceptable but something that has its own reward associated with it, like this opportunity to learned something new, that can be another really great way to encourage curiosity in early childhood.

A third thing that we can do as parents and educators is ask our own questions to children. One kind of research that I've done in my lab is looking at different kinds of teaching styles in the ways in which we interact with children and how that supports their learning and curiosity. So sometimes we can just tell children something. We can say, A causes B, but another thing we can do is we can ask what's called a pedagogical question. So, we ask a question to the child where we are knowledgeable, and we're trying to teach or help them learn.

And so, a pedagogical question might be, why do you think A causes B, or how does A cause B? And now you're turning the learning back on the child to some extent. It's allowing them to explore and think through a solution in their own mind first. And again, it's paired with some direct instruction. So, giving them some content or some structure is also important. But that we have seen in the lab as well is something that promotes children's learning and curiosity.

So those three tactics, I think, using pedagogical questions as a teacher, asking questions to see the child, modeling your own curiosity and wonder about things, and also encouraging children to ask their own questions are three things that not only bolster curiosity but support learning.

JILL ANDERSON: What about that kid who is quiet, maybe doesn't ask questions? What do we do there?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: Yes, there's lots of reasons why children might be quiet or might not ask questions. Some children haven't learned yet that it's OK. They might come from a background where they're encouraged not to ask questions.

So, if you're a teacher see that quiet child, it may be that they're curious, that the gears are turning in their head, but they're not sure that they're allowed to. So, creating an environment where it's clear that it's permissible and rewardable to ask questions is something that I think is an opportunity.

Sometimes children don't ask questions also because they are worried about being judged for not knowing an answer. So, for example, in our own lab, we're looking at the possibility of using tools like AI interfaces for children to ask questions, as opposed to asking questions to a known human because you might be embarrassed to show that you don't have knowledge about something. If you're asking a question, maybe I'm showing, oh, I should know this concept, but I don't.

Now, ideally, we have a society or a world where we know that it's OK to be uncertain. It's OK to share that we don't have knowledge. But until that point, there are other kinds of tools where children might be more likely or willing to ask questions where they don't think they're going to be judged for it, where they think that there's maybe a computer that's providing some information. So that's something else that might encourage that quiet child who might actually be mulling and thinking about things but just restrained for potentially other reasons.

JILL ANDERSON: You mentioned earlier a little bit about this idea that there are things kids may naturally be interested in, and that obviously will vary depending on the kid. But a lot of what happens in education is there are certain things that they need to learn, and maybe they're not interested in them. So, I'm wondering if there's a way to transfer a little bit of that curiosity of interest to an area where maybe the interest isn't there.

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: Yeah, that's a good question. It's a little farther outside my expertise, but I'm aware of the fact that there's different kinds of educational practice, like offering more choice to individuals where you're still doing an assignment, but you get to choose the topic that you're writing about or the kinds of questions that you're asking. Even when you have specific content that you're trying toto a child, there's ways to make it relevant to them. And one of the ways to engage the child is to help them recognize how their own beliefs might not be fully explaining the data. So, we're naturally motivated by our surprise, something that we didn't expect. And we're naturally motivated to fill or close an information gap.

So, if we see that there's something that we don't quite understand, there's actually an instinct that we have that we want to resolve that, that [INAUDIBLE] a piece of curiosity. So, I think teachers recognizing how to bring out that surprise or that information gap for a learner is a way to naturally pique their interest. Even when you're in a topic area that's not necessarily something that they naturally would gravitate toward. 

One way, again, to do that is by asking questions that help the child reflect on, oh wait, I didn't know that right. Or how does that work? And so, when you create that scaffolding like, hey, there's this piece of information you might not already know, that starts to bring out the natural tendency to be interested in it. 

But certainly, there's a balance between creating opportunities for children to be more self-directed and to have more choice in their learning and discovery. And when you can't do that as a teacher, you have content you have to get across, creating opportunities for the student to recognize why this information is so interesting or relevant to them, such as creating this opportunity for surprise or uncertainty because there's new knowledge that the child suddenly realizes through the question or through the prompt that they didn't have before.

JILL ANDERSON: I'm thinking about a classroom where children might be discouraged from asking too many questions. What changes could schools make to create a culture where question asking is central to learning?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: It's such a hard problem, and it's a hard problem because it's top down. We have policies in the United States, for example, where we're evaluating schools based on standardized test scores. Whether or not they get tenure or can maintain their career depend on how the students in their classrooms are performing on those tests. And this leads to a culture where teachers feel like they have to teach to the test. I have to give you this content. You have to memorize this fact in time for this whatever, MCAT next week. And I have limited time in the day to do that.

Part of the challenge is recognizing that to create effective change in our educational system requires some top-down change, figuring out new ways to think about assessments. We do need assessments in schools, but ways to create assessments that don't then create this constraint in the classroom, which now the teacher is considering how to teach for the assessment as opposed to teach for the content. And that is an age-old problem in education.

And of course, there's also just the recognition that there's a balance, that creating opportunities — circle times at the beginning of class where this is our question period where we can sit it a circle, and we'll all ask lots of questions. And after this, we'll have our 20-minute reading period. Those are ways that you can structure a day and retain some opportunity for modeling and encouraging that curiosity behaviors, while still meeting the current structure of the school day or requirements that are coming from policy-level decisions. So that's a balance that I think is going to be a longer challenge for our culture to adopt.

JILL ANDERSON: I know I can only imagine with the expertise that you have you sometimes probably see things happening in schools that are just like, ‘Oh wait, that is going to do the exact opposite of what we want.’ So, it must be challenging to see.

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: I will say — I mean, one of the things that I think is common is a lot of teachers, I think, underestimate the knowledge and skills that children have. So instead of teaching children about mechanism or abstract theory about why things work, you're just supposed to memorize this fact because they have a misconception that younger children especially can't hold abstract causal representations of the world. We know from years and years of psychology that that's not true. Even infants have some abstract representations of the world. Three and four-year-olds are forming intuitive theories about how the world works, and they're fascinated. They want to understand and explain and explore. They want to build that knowledge of how things work.

And so I think helping teachers realize that it's a misconception that you have to do really concrete things, but, in fact, you can talk at the abstract level is something that can both boost the wonder, boost their curiosity, and also boost their broader knowledge of how things work, which then help them explain and do well on tests and explore things.

So, I think one additional amendment that I would make is making sure that educators are not underestimating the abilities of very young children in the classroom in terms of what they're capable of understanding and discovering.

JILL ANDERSON: A lot of folks are thinking about the role of technology, AI, ChatGPT, and how can we use that to support or undermine curiosity in students?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: There's, I think, a lot of caveats. When we're talking about the large language models like ChatGPT [INAUDIBLE] generative texts, first of all, I think that there's moral and ethical considerations we should be engaging with more as educators. So, these have a tremendous toll on the environment in terms of the amount of power draw that they take. They're trained on data that it's not clear if its copyright protected or whether that data [INAUDIBLE] permissible to train these models. 

And also, the ethical ways in which workers who work on those models are treated is in question. So, I think it's important first for educators to recognize that there's many ethical considerations about whether or not this trade-off is worthwhile for them.

That being said, assuming that we are working toward a world in which these tools are more and more adopted, for better or for worse, I think that there's a recognition and an understanding that we don't want children offloading their thinking onto machines, that learning how to plan, learning how to critically evaluate an argument, learning how to brainstorm yourself, generate your own ideas, pulling from memory, those are all things that aren't just needed in one moment. Those are muscles. Those are skills that need to be exercised and developed. So, when we offload those aspects of thinking onto machines, we're really damaging children's broader skills in critical thinking, in planning, in curiosity boosting activities that allow them to recognize their own uncertainty about something.

When you sit and you think about something and you realize, wait, I don't know how this works, as opposed to you just ask the question quickly to a computer, if you don't have that moment to reflect on that, you're missing that opportunity to understand your own limitations. Those are all really important skills that we want to develop in our next generation of workers because we don't know what jobs are going to be existing in 20 years.

So, what we do know is we need to build a generation of learners who are flexible, adaptive, and curious and creative in the way that they solve problems. And so, when you offload all the work of developing those skills onto machines, you're going to end up with a workforce in 15 or 20 years that doesn't know how to think creatively or flexibly.

The second problem is that those machines don't have understanding. They're just fancy photocopiers. They're just generating language from other texts, but they don't really understand how things work. There's no knowledge there that's built on the kinds of causal knowledge that humans have. And so as a result, if you don't have those critical thinking skills, you don't know how to assess whether or not these machines are generating garbage for you or not. It gives you a sentence that says, oh, A causes B, and as a learner if you don't know how to think critically, you say, oh, I'll just take that for fact, even though it's just words that got predicted one after the next and has no grounding in reality.

There's a lot of concerns about using these tools in that respect, for writing essays, for generating ideas, for working through how to solve a problem. All of those are critical, foundational skills in education that we want our children practicing. That's a big set of concern. I did mention that there could be benefits. So, one benefit is that if children are in a setting where they don't feel comfortable asking questions for whatever reason, it could be possible that you're more comfortable asking a clarification question like, wait, what does that concept mean? When I'm asked, what does curiosity mean, I can ask the machine, what is curiosity? I can get feedback. Now explain it to me more simply. I still don't understand. Make it even dumber. I really don't understand. And so, you can have this sort of conversation with the large language generative models that give you feedback in a way that you don't feel judged, and you don't feel embarrassed that you don't have that knowledge.

So that can be a benefit because now you have a better conceptual understanding. If you're working with a teacher or an aide and they say, OK, now I've explained it to you, did you get it, the instinct is to be like, yeah, sure. You don't want to demonstrate that maybe you didn't actually get it yet, but it's OK when you're interacting. So, figuring out how we can create environments where students feel comfortable continuing to say, wait, no, I still don't get it, I still don't get it, that's going to be really important. And until then, until we can create those settings, there could be uses for these kinds of tools where learners feel more comfortable interacting and asking questions. Of course, they might be getting the wrong answers, and they won't have any way to know. So, these are the trade-offs, even in the positive sense, that I think we have to be really careful about.

JILL ANDERSON: What other factors related to curiosity can support learning in schools and at home?

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: So, I think one of the most important factors is joy of learning and having fun and creating playful, safe environments. One of the things we know from the literature in education and psychology is that play supports learning, but it supports learning for lots of reasons. It supports learning because children are naturally engaged, because it's fun. It also because they feel safe. They feel comfortable in an environment where they can be playful, to demonstrate their own uncertainty or ask questions. And so, when I talk about the joy of discovery, when we model our own uncertainty, that can be a playful experience for a child and so creating opportunities in classrooms and in homes where children are still engaging in play. Even recess is critical for learning and development. Children learn so much on the playground about how to interact with their peers. That social-emotional development is a critical piece of learning. And so that really goes hand in hand with curiosity and hand in hand with the critical, broader skills that are important for building lifelong lovers of learning.

JILL ANDERSON: I really love this because oftentimes in education or even at home, as parents, we overcomplicate things. And there's something that seems so wonderfully simple about curiosity and almost like we just forget about it.

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: The opportunities to just take a beat when my child says something like, oh, I was wondering about this. And as a parent, my instinct is like, oh, here's the answer, or here's what I want to tell you, as opposed to creating that, well, why do you think? What do you think about that? Of course, you want to give answers as well as a parent but being able to model back that question and being able to just take a beat and realize like, there's a simple answer here. It's to let your child think more. It's to let your child engage with this, to raise that uncertainty. It's a lovely thing that sometimes we lose touch with as parents and as educators that can be really powerful.

JILL ANDERSON: I know it's so simple, and I'm guilty of doing that myself, where I just forget to ask them. But I'll try to do that today. All right, Elizabeth, thank you so much.

ELIZABETH BONAWITZ: Thank you so much for having me and for your interest today. 

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JILL ANDERSON: Elizabeth Bonawitz is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.