Curiosity and Mystery

I’ve been thinking about the effect of affect in learning while reading The Spark of Learning by Sarah Rose Cavanagh. While I’ve read some of the primary literature on how emotions play a role in learning, it was nice to find many of the highlights in one place. Cavanagh does a good job weaving the studies along with anecdotal material in her book to make her point that emotions do play an important role, and we as educators should take it into consideration. She provides many examples. Today’s post is on Chapter 4 (“Burning to Master: Mobilizing Student Efforts”). I’ll highlight my takeaways; but for the specific examples, please read her book!

 

How do you trigger student interest and draw them into a topic? I’ve dealt with the issue of fostering interest because I often teach the early 8am section of general chemistry – the least preferred time for many students. I’ve also had plenty of experience teaching the nonmajors chemistry course, where a number of students wish they weren’t there but need to fulfil a science requirement. Here’s Cavanagh on the topic: “Interest arises when information is new and potentially complicated, but inherently graspable. Novelty and complexity in the absence of comprehensibility only leads to confusion, which is usually not our goal.”

 

But triggering isn’t enough. How do you maintain student interest especially when some of the material is challenging? Chemistry certainly falls into this category. As Cavanagh says, after triggering, we want students “to burn to know what comes next”. That’s when curiosity is piqued! One way to do this is by introducing puzzles. Essentially you “draw people’s attention to the gap between their current state of knowledge and what they perceive as knowable”. That’s the heart of the most engaging novels and TV series. I can imagine using case studies that require applying chemical knowledge to solve a puzzle. Students get an endorphin boost by being successful in resolving the problem. It’s a virtuous cycle, and boosts confidence and motivation to solve other puzzles.

 

Cavanagh doesn’t stop there. She suggests that, in addition to puzzles, we should introduce mysteries. “Mysteries provoke a different type of curiosity than do puzzles… characterized by deep, effortful, and sustained pursuit of understanding. One engages… not just because one wants to solve and set aside a focused question, but because the quest is its own reward, and the knowledge that the quest is ongoing is enticing.” For me, the mystery I work on as a scientist is the chemical origins of life. I chose it because it’s likely to keep me motivated to the end of my career. I introduce bits and pieces of it into my classes when I can make a relevant connection. But I could improve on how I do so.

 

The subject of getting-into-the-zone or a flow state is tackled next. It draws on the pioneering work of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi who posited that the sweet spot is to “match the challenge level of your activity to the very limit of your skills or abilities”. If things are too easy, boredom results. If too difficult, confusion followed by frustration reigns. What jumped out at me: While the studies show that eliciting the flow state does increase both interest and motivation, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned more – at least when measured via multiple-choice assessments after the activity. Cavanagh speculates that it could be “that flow increases enjoyment but not greater learning… [yet] this can only have good effects in the long term – even if it doesn’t translate into immediate learning gains.”

 

While I’ve spent time designing how I use my class time around hitting this “zone of proximal development” (from Vygotsky’s work), I haven’t spent much time designing mystery or puzzle activities that span more than one class period. (I did design a week-long Alien Periodic Table exercise that I’m proud of, but it was so time-consuming for me that I’ve never done anything like it again.) Hitting the sweet spot is difficult. What seems like a promising exercise or activity can just as well collapse into confusion.

 

Cavanagh writes: “Curiosity and confusion can be considered dark mirrors of each other, in that both involve uncertainty, and both create an itch to know more.” Curiosity is seen in a positive light, while confusion is often viewed negatively. However both can contribute to learning. Encountering confusion should perhaps be expected since we are trying to get students to cast aside faulty misconceptions they have accumulated over time that take some work to dislodge. Perhaps the students experience, for a time, some sort of cognitive dissonance, as they wrestle with seemingly incompatible ideas before they are able to refine their conceptual knowledge. Sometimes ambiguity or uncertainty helps.

 

While I think the evidence for the general effectiveness of “productive failure” is lacking (although I think it can work well in specific instances), there might be occasions when introducing some confusion may be worthwhile. Cavanagh presents guiding principles from her colleagues when applying this in the classroom: “students should possess the ability to successfully resolve the confusion; and/or when students cannot resolve the confusion on their own, there are appropriate scaffolds or buttresses in place to aid the students in their resolution of the confusion.”

 

One last takeaway from the chapter from Cavanagh: “giving feedback to students about what they’ve done right, particularly if it is a skill that they were previously lacking”. I haven’t done this much, but I should.