“I think about curiosity as a sort of ‘mise en place‘ for learning. It gets the mind ready and set up — so that when that information comes in, it’s ready to learn from it and encode it most effectively.” ~ Elizabeth Bonawitz
Kids are learning machines!
But how do they do it?
Cognitive scientist Elizabeth Bonawitz is helping us understand how children learn to learn and what role curiosity has to play in those processes. From dinner table placemats to trading stickers for science facts, she finds creative ways to get at the heart of this most human of mechanisms.
We talk about priming the curiosity pump with pedagogical questions, measuring learning alertness and theta activation, the particular advantages of question practice and training for kids from low SES homes, thought experiments and intuitive theories, prediction as a way to channel uncertainty — and why defining curiosity is such a challenge.
For those kids who came in with lower language scores — lower sort of readiness for school scores, higher attention challenges…kids that might have already been at a disadvantage for, say, starting kindergarten — those were the kids who had the most positive impact from question practice and question training.
LISTEN TO #313: CURIOSITY, KIDS & LEARNING TO LEARN, WITH ELIZABETH BONAWITZ
Elizabeth Bonawitz is the David J. Vitale Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Principle Investigator of the Computational Cognitive Development Lab where she and her colleagues and collaborators conduct research to understand curiosity and explain how children learn to learn.
Check out those printable placemats. And this might have been the first National Enquirer article I ever read!
Listen to Elizabeth Bonawitz’s fascinating talk on the research around prediction. Do you think it’s a curiosity practice?
If you’d like to learn more about learning, try these C2BC Classics: Education & Learning, with Micaela Pond; Curiosity in Apes, with Sofia Forss; The Dr.T ProjecT & Things Worth Knowing, with Shawkat Toowara; The Montessori Method, with Chandra Fernando; and Why Should This Be So? with Susan Engel.
Theme music by Sean Balick. “Cradle Rock” by Nursery, via Blue Dot Sessions.
You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
