How to Cultivate Your Curiosity

Science tells us how to encourage curiosity in children—I wanted a system for staying curious as an adult

Photo by Halfpoint

I never gave curiosity much thought or considered myself a particularly curious person. It’s not that I lacked curiosity — I just never thought of it as a skill you could nurture with time and practice.

That changed when I landed an internship in grad school in a research lab that studies curiosity. Turns out, curiosity is malleable. Teachers can foster children’s curiosity through pedagogical techniques, such as how they respond to students’ questions. They can create learning experiences that spark curiosity.

But teachers can also inadvertently harm children’s curiosity if they ignore questions or exhibit disapproval when a child uses an outside-the-box idea to complete a task. An emphasis on standardized tests may suppress students’ curiosity as well. Why come up with creative, divergent strategies to tackle a question when you are spoon-fed a formula?

Educational psychologists were thinking about these issues over 100 years ago, noting eerily similar criticisms of modern standardized tests:

"Finally, I saw how inconsistent it was to expect this greater amount of creative, independent work from the student when…