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

这个项目将探索如何促进学生的好奇心，以此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有很大关系，但很少有人把它列为他们最感兴趣的科目。提高学生对科学的兴趣，提高学习和教学的趣味性，其中一个方法就是培养学生的好奇心。除了它对STEM领域的激励和创新的重要性外，好奇心还被证明能够导致学习更有个人意义和更好的记忆力。好奇心可以是暂时的，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的信息的愿望，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，以及寻找未知和可以学习的东西的总体倾向。这项研究项目将研究好奇心是如何发展的，课堂学习经验如何影响好奇心，以及如何教授好奇心来支持STEM学习。它将包括一系列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，本科生将接受研究方法方面的指导，K-12、大学和博物馆教师将接受指导，根据研究，哪些是激发好奇心的最佳教学实践。该项目是由EHR核心研究(ECR)计划资助的职业奖项，该计划支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作，联合资金来自发现研究PreK-12(DRK12)计划，该计划支持STEM学习中的应用研究。关于好奇心和信息的研究很少在儿童中进行，更少的研究是在真实世界的学校环境中进行的。本研究将通过一系列实验室实验和基于课堂的研究，探讨学习经历对二年级学生学习好奇心的影响，以及好奇心与参与度、动机和学习之间的关系。这些研究将针对以下目标：1)通过评估学习经历如何影响学生的好奇心，了解如何创造好奇心；2)通过测试好奇心、参与度和课堂学习动机之间的联系，探索好奇的课堂学习是什么样子；以及3)通过测试好奇心中的学习是否会导致更强大的理解和迁移，来调查从好奇心中学习。这项工作将建立在正在进行的关于好奇心和学习的相关性研究的基础上，并试图通过治疗条件设计得出因果联系。开发和验证好奇心的测量和儿童对在现实世界环境中使用不确定性的偏好有望对该领域的其他研究人员有所裨益。此外，该项目将对如何培养好奇心与大学教学实践的研究结果进行一致性评估，包括对大学生好奇心的长期影响的研究。教育整合将与该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。从这项研究中学到的东西可以帮助确定在教学过程中激发学生瞬间好奇心的方法，以及如何创造一个支持更稳定的好奇心的课堂氛围，以培养不断寻找新事物以在STEM学科中学习的学习者。该奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公共法律117-2)。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.