curiosity and deep learning

Granny Priscilla left a very interesting comment a few posts ago about how teachers lead students into caring about things they might not want to care about in order to learn. I think this is a very important point. I'm sure Robin Lightner has articles on this in the ed psych area of motivation, but I was thinking about what helps me study for these recitative exams. I am very curious about these topics. This curiosity makes reading interesting, it helps me make connections among topics, and it helps me find new sources as a result of those connections. If I am bored, angry, not curious, or disengaged then I don't learn well. I'm thinking of that wretched test we had to take for the Internal Review Board. I was all of those things, and I had to force myself to take their little quizzes. I only remember the parts that made me mad, and those were all rhetorical parts, so even though I was mad, I was curious about their choices. Curiosity: wanting to know. It seems like such an essentially primate quality.

So, of course, my mind then turns to, how can I help my students be curious about what I am trying to teach. How can I create narratives about literature (oh, how hard could *that* be?!) so I can get students curious about what happens next or why something happens. This is something Teresa Pica was studying in the 1980s: information gap tasks seemed to help students learn a second language more effectively because they had to figure out what was going on. I suppose this all boils down to being engaged with the topic, but when I think about 'engagement' it seems pretty diffuse, but when I think of curiosity, I feel like I have a better grip.

The other issue I was thinking about as I was studying for exams was that undergraduate life (and maybe graduate student life. Debbie is this so?) is about maximizing resources of time and effort in an overwhelming sea of novelty. This is why 'they don't read' or 'they don't come to lecture' or 'they wait to cram for exams'. These young people are such sensation seekers! and they are so young that it is all so new. Newness and constant change is stressful. The stress researchers place Change as high on the stressometer of life. It is not surprising that we get kids seeming to be 'lazy': they are in a stressful situation, and they're maximizing results for minimum effort. Who wouldn't? So why read if you know the stuff on the exam is just what you got in lecture? why go to lecture if the lecture notes will be provided? Why should I read a novel for which there are no consequences if I don't read it? Curiosity? Well, only if you're some kind of geek.....