Humans seem to lose curiosity with age. Babies, toddlers, young children, seem eternally curious. Then as we grow up, many of us have fewer questions and we’re content with what we think we know. Some claim that formal schooling drives it out and that we should return to some idyllic Eden where wonder was eternal. No one knows what that Eden should look like, and the history of education is littered with failed initiatives. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to improve and adapt our educational approaches to changing circumstances. But one should be skeptical at any proposed magic bullet that would miraculously transform the system.
Curiosity is the subject of Ian Leslie’s very readable and engaging book, Curious. Leslie begins with the familiar behavior of curious babies, toddlers trying to eat everything, children constantly asking “why?”, going where they’re not supposed to, and touching what they’re not supposed to. This phenomenon is dubbed diversive curiosity. Social media and our phone apps are designed to whet this appetite for “the new and the next”. But for curiosity to really pay off, here’s what Leslie has to say.
“Diversive curiosity is essential to an exploring mind; it opens our eyes to the new and undiscovered, encouraging us to seek out new experiences and meet new people. But unless it’s allowed to deepen and mature, it can become a futile waste of energy and time, dragging us form one object of attention to another without reaping insight from any. Unfettered curiosity is wonderful; unchanneled curiosity is not. When diversive curiosity is entrained – when it is transformed into a quest for knowledge and understanding – it nourishes us. This deeper, more disciplined and effortful type of curiosity is called epistemic curiosity.”
In human development, the brain of an infant has many more neural connections than the adult brain, but these are pruned as we age. Thus, “the baby’s perception of the world is consequently both intensely rich and wildly disordered. As children absorb more evidence from the world around them, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful…” That’s actually a good thing. Leslie continues: “It’s essential in becoming a person who can act on the world, rather than one helplessly in thrall to it, hostage to every passing stimulus. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting… As babies grow… into adults, they begin to do more exploiting of whatever knowledge they have acquired… however, we have a tendency to err too far toward exploitation – we become content to fall back on the stock of knowledge and mental habits we built up when we were young, rather than adding to or revising it. We get lazy.”
So how do we maintain a healthy balance between diversive and epistemic curiosity? How do we capitalize on both exploring and exploiting? Leslie dives into some of the studies in behavioral psychology. In considering the cognitive aspects of curiosity, Jean Piaget argues that what makes us curious is encountering an incongruity between our knowledge and a new observation – we are surprised! Simplifying this in a U-shape graph (left side) suggests a happy medium that maximizes curiosity. If you’re not surprised by something, curiosity is low. If something is completely incomprehensible, you don’t want to think about it and shut it out.
George Loewenstein builds on this idea by suggesting that being aware of an information gap (known unknowns) makes us curious. But once again, there’s a sweet spot. If you have zero knowledge of a subject, getting into it is intimidating. Imagine you’re in a group conversation that turns toward something you know nothing about; chances are you’ll begin to disengage. On the other hand, if you’re an expert in something and a novice brings you what they think is “new” information in the area, chances are you’ll be less interested. As a teacher, I’m enthusiastic when my students have an “aha!” moment, but it doesn’t whet my curiosity on the subject. Thus, you can construct a U-curve for the correlation of prior knowledge and curiosity (middle graph). My goal as an educator is to get students into the “zone of proximal development” where they recognize and information gap but not one that is insurmountable. And by guiding them into it, they (hopefully) get excited to know more!
This brings us to the third U-shape graph (right side) – the role of confidence in the knowledge. If you absolutely know nothing about the topic and the information fed to you feels like it far exceeds your capabilities, you get scared and shut down. Fear is a curiosity killer, and it may not even be about the new information. If you’re anxious about having enough to eat, feeling safe, navigating a conflict, or the many other things a student might worry about that are unrelated to what they’re supposed to learn in class, it makes the learning more difficult. Cognitive and emotional resources are being eaten up by the anxiety. On the other hand, supreme confidence that you already know everything (you don’t know what you don’t know) is also a curiosity killer.
So if I want my students to be curious about chemistry, I need to expose them to things that are surprising and unexpected. Chemistry is full of the surprising and unexpected, I’m pleased to say. But I also need to get them to a place where they recognize the information gap and have enough confidence they can bridge the gap. This is tricky to manage in a classroom with a wide range of academic ability and background knowledge. But if I want them to learn the material deeply and not superficially, I also have to help them want to put in the effort to learn. That’s also tricky. A false heuristic that some of my students have been discovering is equating learning easily with learning deeply. This week, two students (independently during office hours) told me their discovery that my “smooth” explanation and going through examples in class made them think they understood easily, but when they had to work problems, they realized they didn’t really understand deeply. We talked about strategies to bridge that gap.
This reminded me of studies on “desirable difficulties”. Leslie also discusses this, connecting it to the cognitive effort that must be employed to encode the material into long-term memory where it can be built on. That’s also why some things students are learning should be memorized because it provides a scaffold that opens up their ability to learn more complicated things. In the old days, a search means “embarking on an arduous quest. It implied a question that led to more questions. You would encounter obstacles, or get lost, and you might not even find what you started looking for, but you would learn something along the way. Your perceptual scope – your mental map – would have increased.” But nowadays, it means “typing a word or two into a box, or muttering them into a mouthpiece, and getting an answer almost instantaneously.” And we leave satisfied by our meagre superficial meal of insta-knowledge that we quickly forget about. The answers seem to come so easily that we forget how to ask meaningful questions. Google even admitted this. When asked by the Guardian if “efforts to refine Google’s accuracy are being boosted as users learn how to enter search terms with greater precision”, the head of search Amit Singhal replied that unfortunately the opposite is true: “The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the questions become.” But I do not yearn for the pre-Internet days. Having such a resource at one’s fingertips can be so, so very useful!
Parting remark: Is the internet making us more stupid or more intelligent? Yes. Depends on how you use it.
No comments:
Post a Comment