Younger children apply cognitive lodging on a regular basis. Consider a toddler whose solely expertise with canines is the household’s small Shih Tzu. Someday, the kid meets the neighbor’s Nice Dane. Wow! The kid’s psychological idea of “canine” shortly expands to incorporate extra sizes and styles.
Cognitive lodging is on the coronary heart of excellent training: It’s what permits college students to construct on prior data to revise, develop, and deepen their understanding of an idea. As Summer season Allen wrote in “The Science of Awe” white paper: “Awe’s capability to elicit cognitive lodging may additionally clarify why people developed to expertise this distinctive emotion. Experiencing awe could also be adaptive as a result of it encourages us to soak up new data and regulate our psychological buildings round this data, serving to us navigate our world.”
The Awe-Curiosity Connection
“One among my favourite findings means that awe would possibly assist spur curiosity concerning the world,” psychologist Craig Anderson informed me. Anderson was a part of a workforce that studied how this emotion influenced youngsters. “The extra awe they felt, the extra curiosity they expressed and the higher they carried out at school,” he stated.
Awe is typically described as a “data emotion.” Paul Silvia, a psychology professor on the College of North Carolina, Greensboro, describes data feelings as “a household of emotional states that foster studying, exploring, and reflecting.” These feelings embrace shock, curiosity, confusion, and awe and stem from experiences which can be “surprising, sophisticated, and mentally difficult, they usually inspire studying in its broadest sense.”
In keeping with Silvia, awe is a robust academic device as a result of it motivates folks to discover issues that stretch their understanding of the world. He wrote, “When folks see stunning and hanging coloration photos of supernovas, black holes, and planetary nebulas, they normally report emotions of awe and surprise. These emotions then inspire them to study what they’re seeing and their scientific significance.”
When You Marvel, 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 unimaginable capability to speak his personal surprise by means of the display screen—significantly his fascination together with his younger viewers.
I reached out to Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski, coauthors of When You Marvel, You’re Studying: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Classes for Elevating Artistic, Curious, Caring Children, to listen to extra about what they realized from finding out Rogers’s work. They informed me:
When Fred Rogers sang the phrases, While you surprise, you’re studying, he wasn’t kidding. In a really actual sense, he was proper. We all know from trendy science that after we’re in a state of surprise, one thing switches on within the mind. We begin to soak up all types of data. And the extra curiosity we really feel, the extra probably we’re to retain that data. . . That’s why some scientists suppose that curiosity could also be simply as vital as intelligence on the subject of youngsters’s success at school.
In keeping 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 data. 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 big 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 stored on listening. Awe, curiosity, studying, reminiscence.
Right here is one other implausible discovering: Curiosity has an amplifying impact on different studying. One research out of the College of California, Davis, discovered that when individuals have been curious concerning the preliminary data offered to them, they might then extra simply soak up unrelated data. Merely being in a curious mind-set helped individuals’ brains memorize materials that they have been much less enthusiastic about. Because the research’s lead creator, Matthias Gruber, stated, “Curiosity could put the mind in a state that enables it to be taught and retain any sort of data, like a vortex that sucks in what you’re motivated to be taught, and in addition every little thing round it.”8
That is information academics and fogeys can use. Partaking with children’ huge questions and serving to them uncover what sparks their curiosity is a concrete solution to help their studying generally. 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 Marvel Can Assist Our Children Thrive.” You possibly can observe her Substack at @raisingaweseekers or on BlueSky at @deborahfarmerkris.
