Supporting Early Scientific Thinking Through Curiosity

Curiosity and curiosity-driven questioning are important for developing scientific thinking and more general interest and motivation to pursue scientific questions. Curiosity has been operationalized as preference for uncertainty (Jirout and Klahr, 2012), and engaging in inquiry-an essential part of scientific reasoning-generates high levels of uncertainty (Metz, 2004; van Schijndel et al., 2018). This perspective piece begins by discussing mechanisms through which curiosity can support learning and motivation in science, including motivating information-seeking behaviors, gathering information in response to curiosity, and promoting deeper understanding through connection-making related to addressing information gaps. In the second part of the article, a recent theory of how to promote curiosity in schools is discussed in relation to early childhood science reasoning. Finally, potential directions for research on the development of curiosity and curiosity-driven inquiry in young children are discussed. Although quite a bit is known about the development of children’s question asking specifically, and there are convincing arguments for developing scientific curiosity to promote science reasoning skills, there are many important areas for future research to address how to effectively use curiosity to support science learning.