Developing Curiosity in Adolescents through the Question Formulation Technique

Curiosity can be defined as, “one’s intrinsic desire for experience and knowledge” and includes the pursuit of challenging and novel experiences. Although several scholars have argued that curiosity can be cultivated, studies have indicated that too few teachers are actually developing curiosity in their classrooms, possibly due to a lack of curriculum techniques focused on inspiring curiosity. Indeed, many scholars suggest directly teaching questioning and inquiry to foster student curiosity, yet relatively few empirical studies on the effectiveness of inquiry methods have been completed. This study will address how educators can foster curiosity by examining the Right Question Institute’s Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a low-cost, easily scalable, classroom-based intervention that seeks to teach students how to ask their own questions about the content they are learning and, in so doing, promotes curiosity and associated intellectual character virtues, such as divergent thinking and open-mindedness. The proposed study will use a quasi-experimental research design to investigate the impact of the QFT on participating students’ curiosity, as well as the relationship between curiosity and participating students’ engagement, self-efficacy, and achievement. We believe that this intervention will have a significant effect upon students’ curiosity. We will share the findings of this study in peer-reviewed articles in high impact journals, as well as at academic and practitioner oriented conferences. In so doing, we believe the findings of this study could provide empirical support for the QFT that could exponentially increase the number of educators, schools, and school systems making use of this pedagogical technique to support students’ curiosity development as well as provide important insights into the effectiveness of questioning in developing students’ curiosity.