Stimulating Curiosity to Enhance Learning: Results from a Randomized Intervention

The intervention involves intensive teacher training, which has two components:
1) Curricular component: Teachers were introduced a specifically designed curriculum to be implemented in classrooms within the 2018-2019 academic year. The curriculum was designed by an interdisciplinary team of teachers, education consultants, and pedagogy specialists. It contains visual and reading materials that emphasize the importance of having an inquisitive and open mind and the benefits of asking questions.
2) Pedagogical Component: Teachers receive various pedagogical (and practical) tips to practice inquiry-based learning and to create an inquisitive classroom culture.
A total of 85 teachers from 40 schools were invited to participate in seminars in November 2018. Teachers are given 5 months to implement the proposed pedagogy supported by the activities prescribed in the curriculum. All teachers who were assigned to treatment received the curriculum materials. The endline data collection is scheduled for April-May 2019.

Motivated by the correlational evidence and the recent developments in neuroscience, we conjecture that curiosity may be cultivated and stimulated in early adolescence period. In collaboration with the Ministry of Education (MoE) in Turkey and a large commercial Bank (as part of its CSR initiative), we evaluate a unique educational intervention to test this conjecture.
The intervention has two major components.

1) Curricular Component: An interdisciplinary team of teachers, education consultants and pedagogy specialists designed a curriculum to be delivered by students’ own trained teachers. The curriculum contains visual and reading materials that emphasize the importance of having an inquisitive and open mind and the benefits of asking questions.

2) Pedagogical Component: Teacher training involves various pedagogical (and practical) tips for teachers to practice inquiry-based learning and to create an inquisitive classroom culture. The material development team provided teachers with structured activities to be implemented in the classroom. The curriculum has a heavy emphasis on science and technology.

An important component of our study involves designing a novel behavioral task to elicit curiosity. We design a temporal behavioral task that elicits a number of facets of curiosity. We will refer to students’ decisions and performances in this task as “experimental outcomes”. We did not implement this task in the baseline as we did not want students to be familiar with it in the endline. Details of the task are given in our pre-analysis plan.
A total of 85 teachers from 40 schools were invited to participate in seminars in November 2018. Teachers are given 5 months to implement the proposed pedagogy supported by the activities prescribed in the curriculum. All teachers who were assigned to treatment received the curriculum materials. The endline is scheduled for April-May 2019.

2018-11-15

2019-04-15

Choices and performances in a novel behavioral task
Objective test scores
Official end-of-year grades
Educational aspirations (study majors)

Choices and performances in a novel behavioral task: There will be 4 outcomes constructed using this task. These are i) interest in science, ii) desire to acquire knowledge, iii) knowledge retention, vi) transmission of knowledge within a network

Details of these constructions are given in our pre-analysis plan.

Test scores: We will conduct math, verbal and science tests in the class. The research team will prepare these tests based on the national curriculum of the relevant grade level. Performances in these tests will constitute our objective measures of math, verbal and science performances.
Grades: These will be end-of-year official grades. These grades are given by teachers based on students’ performances on exams, homework, and participation.

Educational aspirations: We will elicit students’ aspirations for study majors at the university.

1) Perseverance
2) Self-confidence
3) Risk aversion and ambiguity aversion
4) Survey reports of curiosity

1. Perseverance. We will measure this using on a number of item set questions.
2. Self-confidence. For this, we will utilize our math, verbal and science tests. Specifically, we will ask students the number of questions they think they answered correctly for each test after the test is finished. The difference between the student's response and his/her actual performance constitute our self-confidence measure.
3. Risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. These will be measured via incentivized tasks.
4. Survey reports of curiosity. We will measure this using on a number of item set questions.

The study is a clustered randomized controlled trial where the unit of randomization is school. There are 160 teachers from 77 schools recruited for the study. 50 of these schools are primary and 27 are post-primary. We assigned 40 schools to treatment (14 post-primary, 26 primary) and 37 schools to control (13 post-primary, 24 primary). We stratified randomization on grade level (post-primary/primary) and district within the province of Mersin.

The study is a clustered randomized controlled trial where the unit of randomization is school. There are 160 teachers from 77 schools recruited for the study. 50 of these schools are primary and 27 are post-primary. We assigned 40 schools to treatment (14 post-primary, 26 primary) and 37 schools to control (13 post-primary, 24 primary). We stratified randomization on grade level (post-primary/primary) and district within the province of Mersin.

Randomization was done in office by a computer using Stata

School

Yes

77 schools

The sample includes a total of 5892 officially registered students (baseline).

40 schools are assigned to treatment and 37 schools to control.

Attached as a separate document

Stimulating Curiosity to Enhance Learning