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

该项目将探讨如何激发学生的好奇心，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表现密切相关，但很少有人将其列为他们最感兴趣的科目。提高对科学的兴趣并使学习和教学变得更加有趣的一种方法是支持学生的好奇心。除了对 STEM 领域的激励和创新的重要性之外，好奇心还被证明可以让学习对个人更有意义、更容易被记住。好奇心可以是暂时的，包括认识到有一些特定的东西需要学习，以及在特定时间寻求特定信息的愿望，但它也可以发展为一种对不确定性感到舒适的稳定特征，以及寻找未知和可以学习的东西的普遍倾向。该研究项目将研究好奇心如何发展、课堂学习经历如何影响好奇心，以及如何教授好奇心以支持 STEM 学习。它将包括一系列实验室实验和二年级学生的课堂学习。该项目还将涉及广泛的教育和教学内容，其中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研究表明激发好奇心的最佳教学实践。该项目由 EHR 核心研究 (ECR) 计划的职业奖资助，该计划支持推进 STEM 学习基础研究文献的工作，并由 Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK12) 计划共同资助，该计划支持 STEM 学习的应用研究。针对儿童的好奇心和信息进行的研究很少，在现实学校环境中进行的研究更少。这项研究将进行一系列实验室实验和课堂研究，探索学习经历对二年级学生的学术好奇心的影响以及好奇心与参与、动机和学习之间的联系。这些研究将实现以下目标：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、参与度和课堂学习动机之间的关联，探索好奇的课堂学习是什么样子的； 3）通过测试好奇时学习是否会导致更强大的理解和迁移来研究好奇心学习。这项工作将建立在正在进行的关于好奇心和学习的相关研究的基础上，并试图通过治疗条件设计找出因果关系。好奇心和儿童对不确定性的偏好在现实世界环境中的使用的测量的开发和验证有望对该领域的其他研究人员有益。此外，该项目还将评估有关如何培养好奇心与大学教学实践的一致性的评估，包括好奇心对大学生的长期影响的研究。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，以及创造支持更稳定的好奇心的课堂氛围的方法，以培养学习者在 STEM 学科中继续寻找新事物来学习。该奖项的全部或部分资金根据 2021 年美国救援计划法案（公法 117-2）提供。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估，被认为值得支持标准。

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.