Using curiosity to improve learning outcomes in schools

Abstract

Despite a high primary school enrollment in India, the overall learning levels have been low, and the dropout level in secondary school and beyond has been high. One reason for low learning levels and high drop-out rates is the student's lack of motivation to learn in the classroom. We suggest that curiosity may be a useful tool to improve student motivation. We look at some important variables that have been found to affect curiosity in the classroom: self-determination needs, information relevance, coherence, concreteness, ease of comprehension, fantasy, belief about interest malleability, and information gap. Finally, we suggest ways to incorporate them in the classroom to improve student motivation.