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It's Not Just How Smart You Are: Curiosity Is Key To Learning
Scientific American reports that a UC Davis study (paywalled) on how learning interacts with curiosity indicates that curiosity can lead to demonstrably better recall. From the SciAm article:
Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath and his fellow researchers asked 19 participants to review more than 100 questions, rating each in terms of how curious they were about the answer. Next, each subject revisited 112 of the questions—half of which strongly intrigued them whereas the rest they found uninteresting—while the researchers scanned their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the scanning session participants would view a question then wait 14 seconds and view a photograph of a face totally unrelated to the trivia before seeing the answer. Afterward the researchers tested participants to see how well they could recall and retain both the trivia answers and the faces they had seen. Ranganath and his colleagues discovered that greater interest in a question would predict not only better memory for the answer but also for the unrelated face that had preceded it. A follow-up test one day later found the same results—people could better remember a face if it had been preceded by an intriguing question. Somehow curiosity could prepare the brain for learning and long-term memory more broadly."
Isn't this some of those things that kind of is a 'given' ?
Curiosity leads to motivation, stuff you do in an unmotivated or bored state never come out well and (thankfully) will not be remembered.
Curiosity and enthusiasm for your work and an ability to learn? No, you're not a quality hire. We have a culture of mindless ignorant drudgery here. We don't need any free-thinking terrorists on our team.
Most schools makes sure to kill curiosity in its nest.
I just wanted to get the test over with and move on to something interesting and worth remembering. Now we have an official report to prove the self-evident. meanwhile - we cancel art, music, electronics, workshop, anything a student would really want to learn. How about combine music. electronics, and math into a short but immersive synthesizer course. They don't have to build anything huge - but they could physically see what all this algebra and electrical stuff means by hearing it, something worth remembering. A biology/art/science course growing plants? Workshop and physics combined into so many possible ways? - no, we just cancel these sorts of things and impose a standardized testing routine with no experimentation. Poor kids, I heard some elementary schools got rid of recess too. Tragic.
Curiosity ~ Openness
.01, uncorrected—with one region consistent with our hypotheses: an area of parietal cortex involved in working memory and the control of attention. A previous study found that a nearly identical region (Talairach coordinates: 46, 33, 45) showed the strongest correlation between neural activity (during a difficult working memory task) and intelligence (J.R. Gray et al., 2003). This finding is significant because Openness/Intellect is the only Big Five trait that has been consistently and positively associated with intelligence (DeYoung et al., 2005).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
However, we did find that Openness/Intellect was associated—at p less than
etc.
I'm not sure that curiosity or intrigue is some property that you can just "put" into a question, as the summary suggests.
Curiosity is so-obviously a huge factor in interest, but it's something that is - at least in part - inherent in a personality, not a question. You can ask the most wonderfully "intriguing" question of someone but if they have no interest, no desire to know, then it's not going to spark their interest. At best, they'll think there's more to the question, then be disappointed at the "trick".
As someone who works in schools (including private schools), curiosity is actually quite a rare trait. Most students just aren't interested in what their learning because it is - to the most part - not something they want to learn. They get forced to.
And the bright ones will FIND something intriguing about the most dull of subjects. I was always more fascinated by mathematics, and trying computer science to mathematics, and science to mathematics, and even graphic design to mathematics (the golden ratio, etc.) made it more interesting to me. This is the geek's main skill and the source of their brain power - the interest they can find in the most mundane of subjects.
The students that stand out have an unquenchable curiosity about the most mundane of things. They suck the knowledge from their teachers until they run dry and then move on to the next source.
I work in IT in schools - I'm not a teacher - but I had a student just last term who realised that I actually knew some things that his teachers didn't know (C programming, basic electronics, etc.). His curiosity ran riot and he did everything he could to learn more and schedule time that I could show him things (I'm not a teacher, but the school are really good about focusing on the student, so they allowed it). Hell, I took him into the science lab and showed him how to solder circuits because NOBODY had ever shown him how to do it.
This is a young adult that's since gone to an exclusive private school with the best teachers and resources in the world but because soldering was "new" to him, he took it on and within a couple of hours was proficient in it. It piqued his interest, so he didn't let it rest. Did I make it interesting? Did I come up with some link to other subjects he enjoyed? Did I make up stories about the history of soldering to make it more interesting? No.
Curiosity is a trait to instil in your child, at all costs. Not through trick questions, not through forcing them but to just get them to question and - when they do - answer. I can't tell you the number of teachers and parents I see say "I don't know" to a child's question and leave it at that. Or "it's too hard for you". Or even "Shut up, we need to do this next bit".
Instil curiosity by making curiosity the norm. "Well, how does it do that, do you think? I've no idea myself, son. Let's go find out, shall we? Shall we ask that guy that's running the machine?".
Curiosity is the driver here. It's not something you can make happen, it's certainly not something that you can get into a kid by rewording a question - but it's something you can encourage, by asking questions that all the other adults never bother to ask, and never bother to answer either.
... Really? This wasn't suspected, hadn't been demonstrated a million times over? Wow, curiousity an important factor in learning?! Who knew? OH, EVERYONE!
Sadly, there are some real researchers who still aren't funded.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
"Curiosity is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
My advice: Don't waste a lot of time studying things that are already known to be true. (Pretty much everything he said, I take at face value.)
There are no spelling errors in the grandparent post. If he has used a word that you have not encountered before, it is not a reflection on either his level of intellect or education, but on yours.
I was curious, so I looked online and couldn't find the info. So, could you give us the definition of "interprettation", and "errot"?
After that you may want to look up "post", and "pedant".
I completely agree. These people fail constantly at improving "education" because all they see is rote learning. Rote learning is basically worthless these days, once you have reached a sufficient factual basis that allows fast look-up and understanding of not too complicated things. (Understanding complicated things will always take time and most people will never manage to do it, no matter how much data they memorize.) And understanding things is all that matters today. Understanding cannot be created by remembering facts, it is a separate skill. In fact, highly capable people probably "know" a lot less than their dumber fellows and have worse memory, as they can indeed reconstruct most things from a small base of facts and get to train and improve their analytical skills every time they do.
The stupidity expressed in the OP is staggering, but not a surprise. These people obviously never managed to understand anything, and survived by remembering data only.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The classic method is not a failure. It produces exactly what is wanted. There will only ever be few engineers and scientists that deserve the name. It is not the educational system that produces them, they are born like that and just need to pick up (which they do by themselves) the things that are already known in their chosen field of study. This is why "the hour of code" and similar things are such a bad idea: Being a good scientist or engineer is not something you learn, it is something you are.
The US educational system, on the other hand, just served to teach people how to function in modern society (i.e. conformity), and how to not "rock the boat". This might also be the reason why the US has to import so many scientists and engineers: The domestic talent is prevented by all means possible to develop its skills, and hence those few that could be good in STEM are actively prevented from becoming good. The only thing needed would be to recognize them early and move out of their way.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The title is a part of the post. It is not a part of the body, which is what you are incorrectly referring to as a post. On this site your post includes a header(which consists of a title and posting information), and a body. It makes me sad that the ability of people to understand basic words is overshadowed by their inability to be wrong without being childish.