“I wonder…..”: Promoting curiosity in the mathematics classroom

I recently came across an article published in the neuroscience journal, Neuron that caught my attention. The article, by Gruber, Gelman and Ranganath (2014), describes a scientific investigation that explored how curiosity influences memory. The authors found a “link between the mechanisms supporting extrinsic reward motivation and intrinsic curiosity and highlight the importance of stimulating curiosity to create more effective learning experiences” (p. 486). In other words, students will learn more about topics they are interested in – something we’ve known along in the education world, but now we have scientific evidence!

Gruber et al. (2014) claim high curiosity results not only in the learning of interesting information but also incidental material. They also discuss how most of the events a person experiences in a day will be forgotten. If we translate this to children and their classroom experiences, can we expect that they won’t remember much of what happens…