You might think the link between curiosity and learning seems obvious. Neuroscience has, for example, shown that satisfying curiosity activates the brain’s dopamine reward systems, which increases our retention of learning (Gruber et al., 2014). Multiple studies also show that cognitive interest cues (such as surprising facts or questions) can significantly improve student learning outcomes (Goodwin et al., 2022).
Nonetheless, until recently, little scientific research has offered a direct causal link between activating a student’s curiosity and achieving better learning outcomes as a result. Making the link between these two is not easy. For starters, researchers need to measure if classroom interventions truly spark student curiosity—a challenge, as student self-reports of curiosity are notoriously unreliable. Who would admit, after all, to not being curious?
A recent scientific study, however, may finally provide tangible evidence of the power of sparking student curiosity in improving learning (Alan & Mumcu, 2024). The size and scope of the randomized control trial are remarkable: 10,000 students, 134 schools, and 425 teachers, half of whom received one year of training on how to foster student curiosity. Equally remarkable is the clever way researchers found to measure student curiosity—not based on self-reporting, but behavior.
To gauge students’ curiosity, children in both the randomly assigned treatment group (whose teachers had been trained to encourage student curiosity) and the control group (whose teachers received no such training) were shown eight booklets designed to pique curiosity on a variety of topics, such as “the mysteries of space.” Using provided tokens, students set a maximum price they would be willing to pay for the books (versus other items of interest to students from a gift basket). By comparing how many tokens the students in both groups were willing to give up for the booklets, researchers were able to find a tangible measure of students’ curiosity.
They discovered that students whose teachers had been trained to foster curiosity were willing to fork over more tokens for the booklets on average than those in the comparison group (3.6 vs. 3.2), which offers some evidence that teachers had increased their students’ baseline level of curiosity. Additionally, one week after students in both the treatment and comparison groups received the booklets, researchers gave them an unannounced quiz on the content. Students in the curiosity group outperformed those in the comparison group by a small, yet notable margin. Even more strikingly, when researchers gave the same quiz to students three years later, they found an even larger gap; students in the curiosity group retained their knowledge while those in the control group did not, providing a causal link between curiosity and deep learning.
This well-designed study was conducted in Turkey, which spends about one-third as much on K–12 education per student as the U.S. and serves a high percentage of refugee students. The intervention was, in fact, designed with these challenges and resource constraints in mind. The total tab for the training and booklets came out to about $4 per child, which shows that sparking curiosity can be a powerful—and cost—efficient—way to lift all learners.
