Younger children observe cognitive lodging on a regular basis. Consider a toddler whose solely expertise with canine is the household’s small Shih Tzu. At some point, the kid meets the neighbor’s Nice Dane. Wow! The kid’s psychological idea of “canine” rapidly expands to incorporate extra styles and sizes.
Cognitive lodging is on the coronary heart of excellent training: It’s what permits college students to construct on prior information to revise, increase, and deepen their understanding of an idea. As Summer time Allen wrote in “The Science of Awe” white paper: “Awe’s skill to elicit cognitive lodging may additionally clarify why people advanced to expertise this distinctive emotion. Experiencing awe could also be adaptive as a result of it encourages us to absorb new info and alter our psychological constructions round this info, serving to us navigate our world.”
The Awe-Curiosity Connection
“One in all my favourite findings means that awe would possibly assist spur curiosity in regards to the world,” psychologist Craig Anderson instructed me. Anderson was a part of a crew that studied how this emotion influenced youngsters. “The extra awe they felt, the extra curiosity they expressed and the higher they carried out in class,” he mentioned.
Awe is typically described as a “information emotion.” Paul Silvia, a psychology professor on the College of North Carolina, Greensboro, describes information feelings as “a household of emotional states that foster studying, exploring, and reflecting.” These feelings embody shock, curiosity, confusion, and awe and stem from experiences which are “surprising, difficult, and mentally difficult, they usually encourage studying in its broadest sense.”
In line with Silvia, awe is a strong instructional software as a result of it motivates individuals to discover issues that stretch their understanding of the world. He wrote, “When individuals see lovely and placing coloration photos of supernovas, black holes, and planetary nebulas, they normally report emotions of awe and surprise. These emotions then encourage them to find out about what they’re seeing and their scientific significance.”
When You Surprise, You’re Studying
None of this analysis would shock Fred Rogers, for whom surprise was pedagogy. He knew that curiosity is what primes youngsters’s brains for studying. He additionally had this unbelievable capability to speak his personal surprise via the display—notably his fascination together with his younger viewers.
I reached out to Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski, coauthors of When You Surprise, You’re Studying: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Classes for Elevating Inventive, Curious, Caring Children, to listen to extra about what they discovered from finding out Rogers’s work. They instructed me:
When Fred Rogers sang the phrases, Whenever you surprise, you’re studying, he wasn’t kidding. In a really actual sense, he was proper. We all know from fashionable science that after we’re in a state of surprise, one thing switches on within the mind. We begin to take up every kind of knowledge. And the extra curiosity we really feel, the extra possible we’re to retain that info. . . That’s why some scientists assume that curiosity could also be simply as necessary as intelligence in terms of youngsters’s success in class.
In line with researchers, curiosity has a “basic influence on studying and reminiscence.” When children are curious, they’re extra motivated to be taught and more proficient at retaining info. Take into consideration a four-year-old who is aware of the title of each dinosaur, a ten-year-old who can recite and clarify the g-forces of dozens of curler coasters, or a fourteen-year-old who has memorized each Hamilton lyric. No instructor has assigned this work. The four-year-old went to a pure historical past museum and was mesmerized by the large skeletons. The ten-year-old rode their first curler coaster and have become fascinated by the sensation and the physics of all of it. The fourteen-year-old had by no means heard a musical, or historical past, fairly like this one, in order that they saved on listening. Awe, curiosity, studying, reminiscence.
Right here is one other incredible discovering: Curiosity has an amplifying impact on different studying. One examine out of the College of California, Davis, discovered that when individuals have been curious in regards to the preliminary info offered to them, they may then extra simply take up unrelated info. Merely being in a curious mind-set helped individuals’ brains memorize materials that they have been much less enthusiastic about. Because the examine’s lead creator, Matthias Gruber, mentioned, “Curiosity might put the mind in a state that enables it to be taught and retain any type of info, like a vortex that sucks in what you’re motivated to be taught, and in addition every part round it.”8
That is information lecturers and fogeys can use. Participating with children’ large questions and serving to them uncover what sparks their curiosity is a concrete strategy to assist their studying normally. The problem is to not make them fall in love with all topics. However what if we nurtured their curiosity with one or two? What if we paid shut consideration to what sparked their curiosity, what impressed their awe, and nudged it alongside?
Deborah Farmer Kris is the creator of “Elevating Awe-Seekers: How the Science of Surprise Can Assist Our Children Thrive.” You’ll be able to comply with her Substack at @raisingaweseekers or on BlueSky at @deborahfarmerkris.
