CAREER: Promoting science motivation and learning through instructional support of curiosity

本项目将探讨如何促进学生的好奇心，作为支持科学学习的一种方式。学生对科学的兴趣与他们的科学成绩显著相关，但很少有人将其列为他们最感兴趣的学科。提高学生对科学的兴趣，使学习和教学更愉快的一种方法是支持学生的好奇心。除了对STEM领域的动力和创新很重要外，好奇心还被证明能让学习更有意义，更容易被记住。好奇心可以是短暂的，包括认识到有特定的东西需要学习，以及在特定的时间寻找特定信息的愿望，但它也可以发展为一种稳定的特征，即对不确定性感到舒适，并倾向于寻找未知和可以学习的东西。该研究项目将研究好奇心是如何发展的，课堂学习经历如何影响好奇心，以及如何培养好奇心以支持STEM学习。它将包括一系列的实验室实验和以二年级学生为基础的课堂研究。该项目还将涉及广泛的教育和教学部分，其中本科生将在研究方法方面得到指导，K-12，大学和博物馆的教师将根据研究指导激发好奇心的最佳教学实践。该项目由EHR核心研究（ECR）项目的CAREER奖资助，该项目支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作，并由Discovery Research PreK-12 （DRK12）项目共同资助，该项目支持STEM学习的应用研究。很少有关于儿童好奇心和信息的研究，在现实世界的学校环境中进行的研究就更少了。本研究将包括一系列的实验室实验和课堂研究，探索学习经历对二年级学生学术好奇心的影响，以及好奇心与投入、动机和学习之间的关系。这些研究将解决以下目标：1)通过评估学习经历如何影响学生的学习好奇心，了解如何创造好奇心；2)通过测试好奇心与课堂投入和学习动机之间的联系，探索好奇的课堂学习是什么样子的；3)通过测试好奇时的学习是否会导致更强的理解和迁移来研究好奇学习。这项工作将建立在正在进行的好奇心和学习的相关研究基础上，并试图通过治疗条件设计得出因果关系。好奇心和儿童在现实世界中对不确定性的偏好的测量方法的发展和验证有望对该领域的其他研究人员有益。此外，该项目还将评估如何在大学水平的教学实践中培养好奇心，包括对大学生好奇心的长期影响的研究。教育整合将与大学的卓越教学中心、当地的儿童博物馆、跨领域的教育工作者和学生研究人员合作完成。从这项研究中了解到的信息可以帮助确定在教学过程中激发学生暂时好奇心的方法，以及创造一种支持更稳定的好奇心的课堂氛围的方法，以培养学习者继续寻找新事物来学习STEM学科。该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will explore how to promote students’ curiosity as a way of supporting science learning. Students’ interest in science significantly relates to their science performance, but few list it as their most interesting subject. One way to promote interest in science and to make learning and teaching more enjoyable is to support students’ curiosity. In addition to its importance to motivation and innovation in STEM areas, curiosity has been shown to lead to learning that more personally meaningful and better remembered. Curiosity can be momentary, including the recognition that there is something specific to be learned and the desire to seek that specific information at that particular time, but it can also be developed as a stable characteristic of comfort with uncertainty and a general inclination to seek out what is unknown and can be learned. This research project will study how curiosity develops, the ways that classroom learning experiences influence curiosity, and how curiosity can be taught so as to support STEM learning. It will include a series of lab experiments and classroom-based studies with 2nd grade students. The project will also involve an extensive education and teaching component in which undergraduate students will be mentored in research methods and K-12, university, and museum instructors will be mentored on what, according to research, are the best teaching practices for inspiring curiosity. The project is funded as a CAREER award from the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning, with co-funding from the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK12) program, which supports applied research in STEM learning.Few research studies on curiosity and information have been conducted with children and even fewer have been conducted in real-world school contexts. This research will entail a series of lab experiments and classroom-based studies exploring the influence of learning experiences on 2nd grade students’ academic curiosity and the association between curiosity and engagement, motivation, and learning. The studies will address the following aims: 1) Understand how to create curiosity by assessing how learning experiences influence students’ curiosity to learn; 2) Explore what curious classroom learning looks like by testing the associations between curiosity and engagement and motivation to learn in classrooms; and 3) Investigate learning from curiosity by testing whether learning when curious leads to more robust understanding and transfer. The work will build on on-going correlational research on curiosity and learning and attempt to draw causal links though a treatment condition design. The development and validation of measures of curiosity and of children’s preference for uncertainty for use in real-world settings promises to be of benefit to other researchers in the field. In addition, the project will involve an assessment of the alignment of findings about how to foster curiosity with university-level teaching practices, including studies of long-term impacts of curiosity in college students. The educational integration will be done in partnership with the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence, a local children’s museum, educators across domains, and student researchers. What is learned from this research can help to identify ways of sparking students’ momentary curiosity during instruction and ways of creating a classroom climate that supports more stable curiosity to develop learners who continue to seek out new things to learn across STEM subjects.This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.