Children's Scientific Curiosity: In Search of an Operational Definition of an Elusive Concept.

By Jamie J. Jirout, David Klahr. 2012

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Although curiosity is an undeniably important aspect of children’s cognitive development, a universally accepted operational definition of children’s curiosity does not exist. Almost all of the research on measuring curiosity has focused on adults, and has used predominately questionnaire-type measures that are not appropriate for young children. In this review we (a) synthesize the range of definitions and measures of children’s curiosity and (b) propose a new operational definition and measurement procedure for assessing and advancing scientific curiosity in young children. In the first part of the paper, we summarize Loewenstein’s (1994) review of theoretical perspectives on adult curiosity, and critically evaluate a wide range of efforts to create and implement operational measures of curiosity, focusing mainly on behavioral measures of curiosity in children. In the second part, we return to Loewenstein’s theory and present an argument for adopting his “information-gap” theory of curiosity as a framework for reviewing various procedures that have been suggested for measuring children’s exploratory curiosity. Finally, we describe a new paradigm for measuring exploratory curiosity in preschool children, defining curiosity as the threshold of desired uncertainty in the environment that leads to exploratory behavior. We present data demonstrating the reliability and validity of this measure, discuss initial results on developmental differences in young children’s curiosity, and conclude with a general summary and suggestions for future research.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29dcc5cf6904260ed2dc4e85812af4117d614fe1

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Disentangling Curiosity: Dimensionality, Definitions, and Distinctions from Interest in Educational Contexts (2014, methodology): “The reliability and validity of trait curiosity measures has been well-documented, and is highlighted in a recent review as a strength of curiosity research (Jirout and Klahr 2012).”
The Role of Epistemic Emotions in Personal Epistemology and Self-Regulated Learning (2018, background): “This should drive effort and persistence, leading to better learning processes and learning outcomes (Jirout & Klahr, 2012; Muis, Pekrun, et al., 2015).”
Process Account of Curiosity and Interest: A Reward-Learning Perspective (2018, background): “searchers have discussed the similarities and differences in curiosity and interest (Grossnickle 2014; Jirout and Klahr 2012; Silvia 2006), but they failed to reach agreed-upon definitions.”
A Case for Domain-Specific Curiosity in Mathematics (2019, background): “Indeed, curiosity has infrequently been investigated as a domain-specific construct (for exceptions in the domain of science, see Jirout and Klahr 2012; Weible and Zimmerman 2016; Wu et al. 2018).”