Who Seeks Shall Find: How University Education Affects Curiosity

The idea that curiosity is a crucial aspect of childhood development might be older than Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development or Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy, but both these pedagogues did a good job of describing childhood curiosity as a crucial driving force that promotes the acquisition of essential cognitive and motor abilities (Piaget, 2003; Montessori, 2013). Children are inherently driven to discover what is out there and seek answers, a behaviour that earned them the nickname ‘little scientists’, in Montessori’s eyes (Glauert et al., 2013). In fact, curiosity remains a fundamental trait of the successful scientist across their lifetime (Jirout, 2020; von Stumm et al., 2011) and is considered a core component within the study and practice of medicine (Sternszus et al., 2017) as well as the natural and humanistic sciences. The interesting thing about curiosity – the intrinsic desire to learn or know – is that it promotes deep learning with higher levels of understanding than would be achieved with surface-level memorisation of subject content (Richards et al., 2014). Curiosity is also important for critical thinking, because through promoting understanding, people can analyse subject content instead of unquestioningly accepting it. It comes as no surprise that curiosity is found to be predictive of classroom and workplace learning performance (Sternszus et al., 2017), so we might argue that as institutions whose goal it is to bring forth intelligent, inquisitive and critical minds, universities should strive to foster curiosity.

But the question turns into whether or not you feel like university is fostering your curiosity and if not, why do you think that is?

I personally was pretty shocked when, at the end of my first year of studies, I experienced the propaedeutic thesis as more of a stressor than an opportunity to produce an independent piece of scientific literature about any topic that I find interesting. I found myself annoyed at the deadlines and worried about meeting APA standards instead of marvelling at the possibility of finally being able to dive into all the curious research questions that I had collected in my notes over the past five years. The ideal of a student life is to maintain a healthy social life, have a student job to afford rent, do household and administrative chores, all while dealing with assignments, the overwhelming amount of course material, and of course, turn into a critical thinker who cares about their chosen subject matter. Nobody doubts that humanity has produced an astonishing amount of specialised knowledge that we have to learn about in order to make nuanced judgments and decisions – but while desperately trying to squeeze into my head the n-th theory about workplace motivation and what brain areas are part of the ‘default mode network’, where do I find the time to question why these mechanisms operate the way they do? Think of all the multiple choice exams you have likely encountered in the introductory courses of your studies and how knowing that it was “only” a multiple choice exam shaped the way in which you structured your studying. Did you approach the subject matter differently than if you had to write an argumentative essay? A study by Stranger-Hall (2017) implies that exams that include constructed-response questions (such as essay questions) have a positive impact on critical thinking ability and study performance. Some people would argue that through the use of exams that purely rely on content-reproduction, the most prevalent life lesson we will take away from university is not how to understand, analyse and engage with knowledge, but how you can ‘hack your way’ through life the same way you can ‘hack your way’ through a multiple choice exam (Schnieders, 2020).

While this is a pretty grim view of university’s influence on our natural inquisitiveness, there are many ways in which universities do encourage curious investigation. Giving us the freedom to choose what topics we want to write our assignments about is one, giving us the space to hold a presentation about our psychology-related interests and interviewing psychologists in the wild is another. There are associations organising guest lectures and workshops about topics that go beyond the course content, and occasionally, researchers reach out to ask for student assistantship. The problem-based learning approach is getting more and more popular across disciplines and universities, replacing the old-school lecturing-style of ‘knowledge-transfer’ with student-led group work where students tackle tasks in a self-directed manner, encouraging them to come up with out-of-the-box solutions (Allen, Donham & Bernhardt, 2011). The same goes for the inquiry-based learning approach: Tasks are constructed around the creation of information gaps, inciting the desire to acquire the knowledge that is needed to fill the gap (Pluck & Johnson, 2011), for example by structuring tasks as puzzles.

It seems that there is no clear answer to the question if universities are detrimental or contribute to our curious exploration, as there are ways in which we are hindered in the pursuit of our interests as well as ways in which universities encourage it. It appears that a contributing factor in this issue is our own motivation to seek out: We are presented with opportunities  that we can use as outlets for our curiosity, if we choose to interpret those opportunities this way.  Despite the limitations we are faced with, we can take the responsibility to ask ourselves about the intention with which we are studying and allocate our priorities accordingly. We can make time to ask the questions that drive exploration and seize every opportunity in which we are asked to indulge in what we are intrinsically curious about. Why aren’t you doing that yet?