EdLab Podcast: Getting Curious About Curiosity

For Jamie Jirout, associate professor at the UVA School of Education and Human Development, curiosity is a joyful, relatively temporary interest in learning something new—which makes it slightly different from a more sustained interest. 

Curiosity’s intrinsic desire for new information seems like it should be a regular part of children’s classroom experiences. 

But is it?

While she has studied much younger children, Jirout is now focused on students in about second and third grade.  These grades are often when standardized testing begins and Jirout is interested in how those kinds of structures impact students’ understanding about why they’re in school and what the goals of learning are.

“Children sometimes struggle to think about things they’re curious about in school.”

In this episode of EdLab, Jirout, discusses what she has learned about curiosity and her current research projects on the topic. You can listen to the conversation with Jirout wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, including Apple, Amazon, or Spotify. 

EdLab

Transcript

Edited for clarity.

Audrey Breen: Welcome back to EdLab. Have you ever wondered what makes kids so curious? In fact, what even is curiosity anyway? And what relationship does curiosity have with learning? 

Ed lab is a podcast of the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, where we talk to the people behind the school's transformative research, innovative teaching, and thriving partnerships. In each episode, we aim to demystify some of the big questions being asked in education policy, health and human services. I'm your host, Audrey Breen.

Today, I'm sitting down with Associate Professor Jamie Jirout, who is a member of the faculty in our educational psychology: applied developmental science program and whose research portfolio includes studying curiosity. Jamie is here to help us define curiosity and to fill us in on what she is uncovering about curiosity, kids and learning. And if you listen closely, you'll hear how her own curiosity helped put her on this career path.

So welcome, Jamie. Thanks for spending some time here with us.

Jamie Jirout: Thanks for having me.

Breen: I am pretty much starting all of these episodes with a question about how you ended up here.

Jirout: Yeah, I think it's been a lot of luck and randomness.

Breen: Yeah?

Jirout: Going to college, I didn't really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but I had things that I was curious about that kind of led me to doing what I did. So, when I was in high school, we didn't have many AP classes, but we had dual credit at a community college. 

So, my senior year, I mostly took my classes at the community college, and I took one class in psychology or a human development class, I think. And I was interested in how the information in the textbook was decided on, like where it came from, because it was sometimes different from my own experience. I had been babysitting for since I was 11 or 12 years old, and what I was reading about children and children's development didn't seem to completely align with some of the things that were written in the textbook.

Breen: Interesting.

Jirout: Yeah. So, I asked the instructor why I should believe that if it's different from what I experienced, and they explained research and the citations and everything. So then, you know, I finished up my high school classes. It really was luck that in mid-April, at my mom's birthday, my guidance counselor happened to be at the dinner for my mom because they were good friends and asked me where I was going to college.

I was like, oh yeah, I haven't gotten around to applying it. And she was like, Jamie, it's too late to apply to most schools already. So, she helped me find the few schools that were still accepting applications and where my dual credit, where my credits would transfer.

Breen: Oh, right. That's important.

Jirout: And I ended up at the University of Miami in Florida. And my first semester I took a psychology class because it sounded interesting. And I went up to the instructor and I said, you know, my teacher last year told me about research and these citations, and I just want to know, like, why I should believe any of this? Where did this come from? How do we know this information? And she said, well, I have a spot open in my research lab if you'd like to.

Breen: Oh wow!

Jirout: So again, really luck.

Breen: Yeah. 

Jirout: It was a postdoc who needed help on a project. And, you know, that was early in the semester before they'd found someone. So, I was able to join that lab. And the work I did in that project was around children's exposure to violence in their communities. 

Breen: Wow. 

Jirout: So really tough work talking to young children about things that they had seen and experienced.

And it was pretty terrifying to know, like the things that some children go through and how it impacts them. And so really, really important work. And I realized I could not handle that kind of work. That was just too much. 

And what I really wanted to know about is how children learn and how they come to their understandings they have of the world and how it works, and the questions they ask and how they find things out.

So, my second semester of that first year in college, I was able to join a different research lab with Dr. David Greenfield, who studied children's school readiness and focused on Head Start children. And that's pretty much what he did, is looked at how children develop all of the different knowledge and skills and understandings that they have, whereas they become, you know, children in school settings and in that transition from preschool to kindergarten.

And especially thinking about the different kinds of experiences and backgrounds children come, children come from and how that relates to their different experiences that create who they are. 

So yeah, it's just kind of luck. I stayed in that lab for three and a half years, and then he told me I should go to grad school because I seem to really enjoy research, and he helped me to identify different programs where I could continue with the, you know, really rich cognitive developmental focus, but also look into research and questions on education, because that was what I was really interested in is the educational context, but really focused on cognitive development.

Breen: Got it.

Jirout: So that helped me to find my position that I had in grad school. I went to Carnegie Mellon for my PhD, and as part of my senior thesis in undergrad, I looked at children's, I looked at this Head Start program where they implemented a kind of supplementary science curriculum that they just kind of dropped in and added on to what they were already doing.

And in the classrooms that we looked at that used the science program compared to matched control classrooms that didn't use it, we saw that children improved on all of the school readiness domains, not just science. Yeah, almost all of the dimensions that were measured, we saw improvement. 

And so that led me to think like, why is this happening? What could this be that's coming from science, that's kind of transferring and generalizing across children's other areas of development. And I looked at what we were measuring and what they were doing in the program. 

That led me to think about developing children's approaches to learning and particularly their kind of motivation and curiosity. And so that's what got me started in curiosity. And that's what I'm still doing today. With, you know, a few different diversions in the process.

Breen: Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay, I'm ready to get into curiosity. Can you give us a sense of what that word means in your work? I think we probably all have a sense, you know, obviously it's in the vernacular. But the way you think about that word and sort of how you're forming questions around this idea of kids and curiosity.

Jirout: Yeah, I think we all have a kind of sense of what curiosity is, and that's this motivation to want to find out information, the desire to know. And that's a nice way of conceptualizing it, except that there's also a lot of things we want to know that I think we're like, well, actually that doesn't feel like curiosity. So, we have had to become really kind of specific. And that is this iterative process of trying to pinpoint what it really is when we talk about curiosity that aligns with what we want to study.

Breen: Yeah. 

Jirout: And we've come up with some kind of criteria for what determines whether or not some behavior is considered curiosity. And one of the, I think, obvious ones is that it's intrinsically motivated. So, it comes from within. It's your own desire. It doesn't have any necessarily like clear motivating utility factor of like why you're doing it to achieve some goal or some outcome. It's really just this intrinsic desire of wanting to know something. 

We also have differentiated it from more general interest in that. We focus on specific things that you want to know. So, a specific knowledge gap or something that you're uncertain about. And in that way, it becomes something that's somewhat more momentary, whereas interest is more sustained and kind of develops and strengthens over time. 

With curiosity, it's often more short lived and kind of more targeted and specific. And then once you find out what it is you're curious about, then you can move on and usually you become curious about something new. So that's another difference. 

And there's some different ideas about this. But I look at curiosity in children as something that's enjoyable. And, there's a difference in how people think about curiosity that results from this kind of more joyous exploration, desire to know, and this feeling of deprivation or anxiety around not knowing.

Breen: Oh, interesting.

Jirout: Yeah. And we know that both of those do lead to curious looking behavior.

But when you look at when people seek information, when they're that kind of more joyous type of curious versus that more deprivation motivated curiosity, you see different associations with other outcomes that we wouldn't expect from the way we think about curiosity. 

So, for example, the kind of interest or joyous type of curiosity relates to things like intellectual humility, which is really important, and persistence and gaining knowledge.

And you see almost the opposite with that deprivation kind of curiosity. So, people who are higher on deprivation curiosity are more likely to be susceptible to misinformation. And they’re less intellectually humble. 

And so, we're really focusing on that kind of more positive affective type of variability in children setting.

Breen: I know you are working with kids in your lab. Can you give us a description of what it is you're looking for? Sort of you know, playing out of what that sort of joyous curiosity might look like?

Jirout: Yeah. And so, we're looking at this across contexts because we want our research to be relevant and informative of actual educational practice. And for that to happen, we need to do research in schools. 

Breen: Got it.

Jirout: But it's really hard to control anything in school contexts. And so, it might look like there's this pattern of, when this happens, children are more curious. But you don't know about 100 other things that have happened before that or that you can get out in the moment.

So, we try to do complementary studies where we go into schools and we look at what's happening and look at curiosity over time, and what teachers are thinking about and doing intentionally to promote their students’ curiosity and how it relates to other things. And then in the lab, we do things where we kind of control for as much as possible and manipulate what it is we think might be happening.

And so, the questions are just different that you can answer. In schools we can say, you know, what is happening that's associated with changes in curiosity over time or related to learning by way indirectly through curiosity and those kinds of questions. And in the lab, we can do more causal direction kinds of explorations and look at how what we think promotes curiosity in the classroom, whether we can actually manipulate that in a controlled way and randomly assign children to conditions and everything and then see what outcomes we have.

So for example, giving children choice and autonomy in choosing what they want to learn about and how they want to seek information, or having children come up with the questions they're exploring versus being given the questions versus being given instructions not in the form of a question, and seeing how that plays out and influences or changes what they do when they're actually seeking that information, how curious they are after the fact, and their retention of what it is that they learned.

Breen: And can you give us an example of an activity that you or either have seen in a school setting or in your lab, and maybe what the kids are doing?

Jirout: Sure. We see a lot of examples, you know. It's nice because we don't see a ton of curiosity promotion where we're observing what's happening with the teachers. But when you're just giving children the kind of open-ended chance to explore, they are all about it. They love exploring. So, in the lab that one of the tasks that we use is a sink-float task where we give children the big bin of water and a bunch of different objects, and they're allowed to…We tell them, you know, you're trying to learn what things sink in, what floats and why. And we give them a little bit of information about density and see how much they can explore to better understand that. 

But, you know, you can't predict what children are going to do. You start to combine the different objects together. They, you know, push it down and let it go halfway in the water and see if it goes up and down instead of dropping it from the top and they just do all sorts of things.

Same thing, even if you just ask them questions like what questions do you want to know more about? What things are you curious to know? They come up with questions you could never guess and even their questions. We have a task where they can use questions to solve a problem. So not so much curiosity, but their ability to seek information.

Question-asking skills in general. These questions where we try to prepare answers so we can give them the information. But then like what did the mystery animal evolve before or after this other kind of animal? We're like, oh, I don't know.

Breen: And remind us about what age, children you're working with?

Jirout: So, we've done work with children as young as preschool and kindergarten, but we're really focused now on early elementary, like around second and third grade, because I want to know how the classroom culture and the school culture influence the way that teachers and children are thinking about why they're in school and what the goals are. And that's around the time where we start to have a more of an emphasis on standardized assessments and get a more concrete content focused learning outcomes.

Breen: And I even think of the way the rooms look, feel really differently in that second and third grade classroom versus sort of the different spaces in the early, earlier childhood. That's still early childhood, but.

Jirout: Yeah, definitely. And I think all of that can influence children's thinking about again, like why they're there or what the goals are. And in my research, we do ask children about what they think curiosity means and what they're curious about and look at how frequently they talk about things that are curious about in school. And children struggle sometimes to think about things that they're curious about in school.

We do find, there's another study that we, you know, we're modeling our work after that was done in the Netherlands, and some children there gave responses like, “Why would I be curious in school? I’m here to learn what the teacher's supposed to teach me.” 

And so really looking at all these, these children are able to tell us what they're curious about. And it has to do with things that we would consider academic subjects. Right. And yet they don't see that as consistent with what they're in school to do. That is.

Breen: Really interesting. You mentioned the retention. What have you found on the retention side? When a child or a young student can generate their own question and begin to explore these, you know, ideas more intrinsically?

Jirout: Yeah, we're still collecting data on the study I mentioned, so we won't know the results of that yet. But we have looked at children's recall of information during like information seeking task or exploration tasks. 

And we find that even if you control for how much information children found or were exposed to, that you see a positive association where children who are more curious during that information seeking do retain more of that information. When you look at how much they can recall after the task.

So there. Yeah, there is that benefit. And it's interesting because there is some evidence to suggest that the benefit of learning while curious spreads. It's not just that you have better retention for what it is you're curious about. But just being in that state of, kind of that heightened activation state of being curious, you get benefits for even the other information that you're not curious about as well.

And there's been some mixed data. So, we see some of that. And there's been several studies that have found that with adults and older children. But also there's one study that they didn't see that same effect for younger children. Not as young as what we were testing, but I think, you know, all of these again, it's education and learning is very complicated here. There's a lot of things that matter.

Breen: Yeah.

Jirout: So we think that benefit is there. But there are some exciting.

Breen: What is it that you think curiosity brings to the experience of learning? And why should this be a part of the way we create systems of learning?

Jirout: Yeah, I think there's a lot of different levels that you can think about the potential benefits or reasons why we might want to do this at the lower kind of cognitive level. When you are curious about something, by definition, because you're curious about something specific that's related to a gap in your knowledge. In order to identify that gap, you're kind of activating the relevant information that you already know and things that are connected to that information.

And so, when you're exposed to it, you're going to encode it in a more meaningful way. So it's going to already connect to things that you already know, which is just going to strengthen, you know, your ability to retain and recall it because there's going to be more cues to getting that information, your ability to transfer it and use that information in new contexts because you have those links in that knowledge representation, the way that you're thinking about how that information fits with other things, you know.

And so it's just going to add to kind of what will be encoded. You have to be better able to pay attention to the relevant information you need. So, there's going to be cognitive benefits in the learning process. And that's going to support that retention. 

But I think also motivation also, like there's a big benefit where it's just easier to put in the effort to find information if it's something you value and care about. 

And we know there's benefits for intrinsically motivated information seeking versus extrinsic in terms of kind of meaningful learning and term retention. And then I think at the larger scale, it's more enjoyable.

Breen: Right, right.

Jirout: And yeah, so I think it's more enjoyable not just for students but for teachers. 

And I think also when we think about education, like the goal isn't to get people to and to learn and remember the things that we're teaching in schools. I think we also have this broader goal of shaping individuals to be lifelong learners. 

If you look at school districts and their mission statements and their strategic plans, that's what they care about, right?

Breen: Right, right. 

Jirout: And if people are thinking they're there to learn what they're supposed to learn and then they're done, that is not leading to lifelong great learning. 

Breen: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Jirout: So, if you help people to recognize opportunities to become curious and kind of have that mindset of always looking for things that they want to know that they don't currently know, and seeing mistakes and ignorance as opportunities to learn rather than, you know, things that are bad.

Breen: Yeah, yeah.

Jirout: I think that's going to lead to having more people who are open minded and kind of seeking out learning later in life.

Breen: Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. 

We often talk about how our work is connected to all sorts of partners. Can you talk a little bit about who your partners are in your work and how they contribute to sort of your scholarship?

Jirout: Yeah. We, in our own thinking about what we value in our research and what motivates us to do it, I think we care about doing things that are relevant and needed by actual practitioners. And so I think of school districts and especially teachers as partners in this work in terms of identifying kind of, what do they want to know? What are they trying to do that we can help support, and especially around things that we think are important to kind of change from more traditional models of education. 

And for us, like, I have people on my team who are who have experienced teaching in classrooms, but I've only taught in higher education, right. And so for me, having teachers as partners that I can learn from, I can think some things I know promote curiosity in classrooms.

Then a teacher can say like, yeah, theoretically, but practically, no, that would never work for these eight reasons.

Breen: Yes. Right.

Jirout: So, we learn a lot from teachers, both from observing them and just talking with them. And then also having their perspectives represented and how we're interpreting data we're looking at. So that's an important partnership. 

And then of course in getting the work done, there are a lot of people who are involved, right. From, you know, the funders who decide it's worth funding to the students and data collector staff and, collaborators who are always bringing in new perspectives and new ways of thinking.

So, yeah, I think there's a lot of a lot of partners that make this work happen.

Breen: One last question I have for you before we wrap up.

Thank you again. I've. I guess I'm always fascinated to talk about your work and learn more about it. 

A question I tend to wrap up these conversations with is, let's fast forward to ten years in the future. We're back here having another conversation. What do you hope we know, in ten years that we don't yet know now.

Jirout: I hope we know how to change the way that people think about the goals of education, because I think when you really push people, they'll say like, yeah, it's important to develop all of these other things beyond, you know, knowing the content and being able to regurgitate facts and everything. But I feel like the focus is always on those test scores or on the content focused learning objectives.

And I don't think I don't know that we know yet how to shift that idea of what education is for and what the goals are, and also how to assess. So it's always the assessment and the ways that we evaluate things are going to drive what we're doing, learning or teaching.

Breen: Yeah. 

Jirout: So having more ideas and better ways of assessing a broader range of things that we care about, we talk about these in some other projects as character values or virtues, which you know, is kind of a heavy term to interpret. But even in our college classes, we have a project now we're working with faculty trying to think about what is it that we care about and how we're changing students or helping our students to develop themselves in who they are.

Breen: Yeah.

Jirout: And how can we promote that and build in more opportunity for that development to happen in our classes? Right. I think it would be amazing if we had that in ten years from now. That idea and, initiative happening in all aspects of education where people are thinking about what it is that matters and including more things than the content itself and also having ways of knowing if we're doing that well and can understand how that happens.

Breen: Well, I, I hope we keep having these conversations and we'll see how this goes. 

I am so grateful for you, Jamie, and your work. And I, when I see the word curiosity, I'm like, oh yeah, I need to sort of invest in that and foster that and really sort of unleash that in my own world.

So, thank you. Thank you for reminding us about the joys of curiosity and for your work as a scholar. And, I'm so glad you…What was that, your school counselor who happened to come to your mom's birthday party? I am grateful for those happy accidents. And, Yeah, that led you here in doing this work. Thank you. Thanks for spending some time with us today. 

Jirout: Thank you for having me.

Breen: Take care.

EdLab is a production of the UVA School of Education and Human Development. And WTJU 91.1 FM. EdLab is produced by Audrey Breen with support from Mary Garner McGee and Sage Tanguay. Our music is Palms Down by Blue Dot Sessions. You can listen to and subscribe to EdLab wherever you get your podcasts.