The prospective role of epistemic curiosity in national standardized test performance

Facilitating Youth's Curiosity in Learning: Needs-based Ecological Examinations

The decline of curiosity during adolescence has received increasing concerns in education. The present study aimed to identify the key factors in the environment that promote young people's curiosity from a needs-based ecological perspective, focusing on family and school. To enable a better understanding of the developmental effects, this study compared two age groups: 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds. A total of 5482 Finnish students (3034 aged 10 and 2448 aged 15; 48% female and 51% male) from the OECD Survey on Social-emotional Skills participated in the study, and their family and school factors related to basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) were assessed through surveys. Hierarchical Linear Modeling results revealed that: (1) contrary to the expectations, factors that support competence and relatedness facilitated youth curiosity to a greater extent than factors that support autonomy; (2) positive relationships with teachers were more beneficial for curiosity among older youth than younger youth; whereas, a sense of belonging at school was the most important factor for younger youth's curiosity. These findings have significant implications for promoting curiosity in general as well as during different age periods.

Adapt, Explore, or Keep Going? The Role of Adaptability, Curiosity, and Perseverance in a Network of Study-Related Factors and Scholastic Success

Soft skills are the key characteristics for students' success and wellbeing in the 21st century, but they were only rarely studied contemporarily or integrated into comprehensive models of self-regulated learning. This makes it difficult to understand the role that specific skills have above and beyond the others and how they work together to favor students' achievement and life satisfaction. For this reason, in a sample of 585 students (10-18 years old), we applied an exploratory network analysis and studied three crucial soft skills (i.e., adaptability, curiosity, and perseverance) and their contemporary network of inter-relationships with a host of functional study-related factors, including self-regulated learning strategies, motivation, emotions, cognitive abilities, academic achievement, and life and school satisfaction. Results show that the three soft skills play a positive role within the school context through their association with the majority of the study-related factors that mediate their relationships with academic achievement. Importantly, the results differentiated adaptability (which mainly relates with wellbeing and emotional variables), perseverance (which relates with the cognitive and behavioral aspect of learning), and curiosity (which bridges the connection between the other skills and relates with emotional and behavioral variables) in the school context. Overall, these findings contribute to the deepening of the theoretical framework on soft skills and their role as part of a successful learning profile, and inform us about the possible effectiveness of intervention on soft skills for students' achievement and wellbeing.

How Does Hands-On Making Attitude Predict Epistemic Curiosity and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Career Interests? Evidence From an International Exhibition of Young Inventors

Whether the hands-on experience of creating inventions can promote Students’ interest in pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career has not been extensively studied. In a quantitative study, we drew on the attitude-behavior-outcome framework to explore the correlates between hands-on making attitude, epistemic curiosities, and career interest. This study targeted students who joined the selection competition for participating in the International Exhibition of Young Inventors (IEYI) in Taiwan. The objective of the invention exhibition is to encourage young students to make innovative projects by applying STEM knowledge and collaborative design. We collected 220 valid data from participants in the 2021 Taiwan IEYI selection competition and conducted a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses. Results indicated that: (1) hands-on making attitude was positively related to two types of epistemic curiosity; (2) interest-type epistemic curiosity (IEC) and deprivation-type epistemic curiosity (DEC) were positively associated with STEM career interest; additionally, DEC had a higher coefficient on STEM career interest than IEC; (3) both types of EC had a mediating role between hands-on making attitude and STEM career interest. It is expected that encouraging students to participate in invention exhibition competitions can raise both types of EC and increase their interest in pursuing STEM careers.