Abstract
Given the link between curiosity and students’ motivation and achievement, research often explores when and how students experience curiosity in school. However, participants are rarely asked to define “curiosity” before researchers measure it. In this case study, we investigated high-school students’ experiences of curiosity through three semi-structured interviews and 11.25 hours of video-recorded classroom observations. Students used “interest” and “curiosity” interchangeably, but described their emotions clearly, allowing researchers to compare their descriptions to scholarly definitions. Students also reported that teacher actions facilitated their curiosity and that they pursue curious topics outside of school. Results highlight a discrepancy between researchers’ and laypeople’s definitions of curiosity, stressing the need for conceptual clarity and valid measurement. Future research should focus on the skills students need to assess sources they consult independently.
Introduction
Education researchers have long studied the construct of curiosity, which evidence indicates is related to students’ use of self-regulation strategies (e.g., Muis et al., 2015), performance on standardized exams (e.g., Tang & Salmela-Aro, 2021), and originality in problem-solving (e.g., Hardy III et al., 2017). As such, many researchers are eager to fully capture curiosity’s potential to improve the learning process, which requires defining “curiosity” such that it is correctly operationalized. Accurate definitions can enable educators and researchers to better identify instances of curiosity in the classroom, which in turn support promoting curiosity among students.
Much of the scholarly work focused on establishing a definition of the term has been either theoretical or in the vein of concept refinement, in which researchers presuppose a construct’s definition and determine fit of both that definition and key dimensions of the construct through statistical testing. To our knowledge, only one project (published in two papers) has involved asking participants whether and how they distinguish between curiosity and interest (Aslan et al., 2021; Donnellan et al., 2022). Learning about participants’ understandings and use of the term “curiosity” can improve the precision and practical value of educational research, ensuring that when researchers engage participants in study activities like surveys or interviews, they maintain a shared understanding of the construct under investigation. Because educational researchers are actively working to understand curiosity and distinguish it from other concepts, it is vitally important to have a clear understanding of how laypeople, including students participating in research studies, are using and making sense of the term.
To address this need, we conducted a multiple methods study by partnering with students with disabilities (SWD) at a therapeutic high school. Broadly speaking, educational researchers often treat SWD as a population whose experiences and insight are separate from other learners, without systematic determination or justification for that approach (see Heddy et al., 2025). In this project, we intentionally positioned the experiences of SWD as a site of knowledge production that can inform future work in this area for all learners. Evidence indicates that many adolescents struggle to talk about or adequately detail their emotional experiences due to skills they are still actively developing like emotional granularity and vocabulary (e.g., Lane & Schwartz, 1987; Saarni, 1999); alexithymia (e.g., Zimmerman, 2006), or their cultural and social contexts (e.g., Horner et al., 2015). The students in our sample, however, have substantial experience and practice talking about their affective experiences because of the therapeutic services integrated into their school day. This makes them well-suited for exploratory inquiry into how individuals define and experience emotions for themselves, above and beyond typical adolescents.
We conducted three rounds of interviews to capture students’ experiences of curiosity, including what they do when they experience feeling curious in class. Then, we conducted video observations of the students in their math and/or science classrooms to determine whether they initiated the behaviors they describe. Our findings have implications for the methods by which data about curiosity should be collected; the locations where curiosity can be measured; and the nature of student curiosity engendered in schools, where curiosity can be tempered by the compulsory nature of K–12 education.
Literature Review
Psychologists distinguish between feelings, emotions, and other related subjective states like mood or arousal. For educational researchers, understanding the distinctions between these constructs is important for precision in analysis, appropriate selection of measurement tools, and designing effective interventions to support students in learning contexts. Although there are varying viewpoints, emotions are often defined as brief, specific, and coordinated responses to particular internal or external stimuli, and have physiological, behavioral, and cognitive components, whereas feelings are the subjective, conscious experience of those emotions; that is, an individual’s internal process of perceiving, interpreting, and making sense of emotional states (e.g., Frijda, 2008; Niedenthal, 2008). As an example, imagine a student mispronounced a word during a classroom presentation and noticed several peers laughing. This stimulus might elicit the emotion of embarrassment, characterized by immediate physiological and behavioral responses such as increased heart rate, blushing, and averting their eyes away from the giggling peers. Subsequently, the student might reflect on the subjective, internal experience of the emotional event; that is, the feeling associated with the initial emotional response, and notice they felt self-conscious or exposed.
In this study, we focused on students’ experiences of curiosity as an “epistemic emotion” (Pekrun, 2006), a technical term defined as emotions experienced in relation to learning or knowledge. Epistemic emotions sit at a conceptual crossroad between affect, behavior, and cognition; these emotions have affective qualities and physiological correlates, and represent motivational states because they drive cognitive actions aimed at, for example, gaining knowledge or resolving uncertainty. They form a bridge between action and subjective feeling in the context of thinking and learning.
According to Pekrun’s (2006) Control-Value Theory (CVT), epistemic emotions are central to understanding students’ motivation, behavior, and achievement. Empirically, epistemic emotions are associated, at least in part, with individuals’ confidence in their knowledge before they experience cognitive incongruity, and are further linked to subsequent knowledge exploration (e.g., Vogl et al., 2019, 2020). As students encounter new information, their experiences of epistemic emotions are predictive of behaviors associated with learning and achievement. For example, a student who feels confused by new content may be motivated to resolve the confusion by asking the teacher a clarifying question, checking in with a peer, or searching an available resource for an answer. Another student who experiences confusion, however, may disengage from learning activities instead.
Although there are myriad ways students may experience (and make meaning from their experiences of) emotions, there are some predictable patterns. Within CVT, Pekrun (2006) categorizes emotions as either positively or negatively valenced, referring to whether an emotion feels good or unpleasant. Within CVT, emotions are also categorized as activating or deactivating. In our example above, the first student might experience confusion as negatively valenced but activating, whereas the second student is experiencing confusion as negatively valenced and deactivating. Other epistemic emotions, such as curiosity, can be categorized as positively or negatively valenced and activating or deactivating as well. For example, deprivation views of curiosity describe negatively-valenced experiences associated with an individual perceiving their lack of knowledge as undesirable (e.g., Litman & Jimerson, 2004). These individuals may be activated to attain the knowledge they are missing, or deactivated by, as examples, an accompanying sense of feeling overwhelmed or having a perceived lack of competence. Other conceptualizations of curiosity tend to describe this epistemic emotion as a positively-valenced experience that individuals find activating (e.g., Pekrun, 2006).
In addition to identifying the key characteristics of epistemic emotions, Pekrun (2006) further distinguishes emotions that can be epistemic if the object focus is knowledge acquisition or learning tasks. For example, frustration, boredom, and anxiety, can be epistemic: a student may feel frustrated at experiencing cognitive incongruence, bored by new information, or anxious about closing a knowledge gap. By contrast, students might indicate they feel non-epistemic versions of these emotions as well: for example, frustrated when a classmate is bothering them; bored waiting for supplies; or anxious about achievement on an upcoming exam. The growing body of literature on the topic of epistemic emotions includes other emotions that educational psychologists frequently measure, such as wonder, surprise, and confusion (Pekrun, 2006). In this study, we focused on curiosity, an emotion that has been linked to adaptive learning strategies and positive learning experiences.
Current Status of Attempts to Define Curiosity
Researchers have explored the notion of curiosity for decades (e.g., Silvia, 2012). Because it can be a positively-valenced and activating epistemic emotion, educators may be especially vested in understanding whether and how curiosity facilitates learning, motivation, and academic achievement. In this study, we do not aim to make real contributions toward the definition of curiosity, but instead determine the extent to which researchers and participants have a shared understanding of the construct. Nevertheless, we feel it is important to briefly situate the present study within the current state of the field in terms of attempts to define the construct. This is in part because, to date, much empirical and conceptual work has aimed to define curiosity by distinguishing it from a related construct: interest. Whether future work will continue in this vein (e.g., defining curiosity by considering the distinctions between it and constructs like excitement or enthusiasm) remains to be seen.
Although there seems to be general agreement that curiosity arises from the need to close a knowledge gap (Schmidt & Rotgans, 2021), the distinction between curiosity and other, related constructs is a more contested matter that has received a great deal of attention in the literature–particularly related to the difference between curiosity and interest. Reviewing the entirety of literature on this topic would necessitate a paper unto itself. One excellent resource towards this end is the special issue of Educational Psychology Review led by Grossnickle-Peterson and Hidi (2019) devoted to untangling curiosity from the concept of interest; summarizing the work of the authors included in that publication, we briefly list here some of the main contentions about curiosity.
First, some researchers define curiosity as a phenomenon that happens in a single moment and is about a specific concept or idea. As Hidi and Renninger (2019) explain, “Promoting curiosity is unlikely to lead to the kind of self-initiated information search that results in longer term, deep involvement with content,” (p. 841). This positions curiosity as something that motivates people to inquire about specific knowledge in a specific context; that is, it may be situated and short-lived.
By contrast, some scholars claim that curiosity is a distinct experience from other constructs, but comes first in a temporal order in cases where it develops into something else (e.g., interest). For example, that initial feelings of in-the-moment curiosity can pave the way to interest, which is more long-lasting (Ainley, 2019; Alexander, 2019); or that curiosity and interest are very similar early on, but then branch into different constructs as time goes by. This reflects foundational work by Dewey (e.g., 1933) who suggested that curiosity develops into interest across three stages. A developmental view of curiosity has been linked to well-being (e.g. Reio & Sanders–Reio, 2020), indicating that experiences of curiosity are both adaptive and enriching.
Researchers largely agree that curiosity drives learners’ behavior. Ainley (2019) writes that, “curiosity continues to be seen in the exploratory behavior and questioning that occurs when novel and puzzling phenomena are encountered within an interest domain” (p. 797). This stance positions curiosity as something that parents and teachers could facilitate or encourage: that is, they can “model . . . a questioning approach” (p. 796) that elicits greater and greater curiosity in a given domain. By contrast, Schmidt and Rotgans (2021) suggest curiosity is a stable disposition. As such, teachers would be limited in their ability to trigger curiosity among those without the disposition, but would have more success triggering interest.
Finally, some scholars contend that interest is an umbrella term that includes curiosity (e.g., “curiosity is a special case of interest” Pekrun, 2019, p. 905). From this perspective, the transient state of curiosity is facilitative of establishing an enduring state of interest. One implication is that educators can harness students’ initial curiosity into broader interests. That is, one of the working assumptions about the nature of curiosity from this perspective is that it is not solely an intrinsic experience; it can be extrinsically invoked. Further, it can be cultivated into an entirely different psychological experience; in this case, the authors argue, that of interest.
Representations of Curiosity in Empirical Studies
In the midst of this debate about what curiosity is and how it differs from other constructs, researchers have relied on a range of definitions for the term “curiosity.” For example, rooted in Pekrun’s (2006) Control-Value Theory, Muis et al. (2015) described curiosity by its relation to other constructs (it is preceded by a valuing of the topic at hand, associated with problem-solving, etc.) and what it does (drive knowledge-seeking behavior). Tang and Salmela-Aro (2021) drew on the work of Litman (2005, 2008) to describe curiosity as either a state of knowledge-deprivation, a state of knowledge-seeking, or as a personality trait; a general tendency to seek out novel information. Hardy III and colleagues framed their study similarly, drawing on Mussel’s (2013) and Litman and Silva’s (2006) work to distinguish between states and traits, but used the phrases “diversive curiosity” (characterized as a desire to explore new topics) and “specific curiosity” (characterized as a desire to acquire missing information).
As expected, the way research teams defined curiosity shaped how they measured the construct and analyzed data. In some studies, curiosity is defined as a knowledge gap that extant knowledge can fill, as opposed to a knowledge gap that can only be filled with new knowledge generation. This reflects often-unspoken epistemological commitments about the nature of knowledge that further influence study design. In much recent work, studies of curiosity generally follow the same structure: participants engage with an informational text, attempt to solve a problem or respond to a question based on the information they were given, and are then provided with an opportunity to explore the topic beyond what they were initially given (Schubert et al., 2023, ; Tang et al., 2022; Vogl et al., 2019). The implicit message is that more knowledge is readily available, should participants choose to access it.
Research teams further vary in whether they define curiosity as a force that initiates a behavior, an emotional state or sensation, or both. For example, Muis et al. (2015) focused on curiosity’s behavioral manifestations, defining curiosity as driving “deeper engagement during problem-solving” (p. 174). In their meta-analysis, Tang et al. (2022) indicate that curiosity is a state of wanting to know something. Comparatively, Ainley (2019) defines curiosity as a state, but as one of uncertainty. Vogl et al. (2019) define curiosity both as (1) a “drive to know” (p. 626) that (2) promotes particular behaviors (e.g., exploring knowledge and enhanced memory). In 2022, and then with colleagues led by Schubert (2023), Pekrun defined curiosity as complex, with behavioral and affective components that can each be understood separately.
A Notable Gap and the Present Study
Of note is the fact that, to our knowledge, there is only one project currently described in peer-reviewed journals (presented across two papers to date: Aslan et al., 2021; Donnellan et al., 2022) in which researchers asked participants how they define curiosity for themselves. Part of the project included comparing participants’ responses to experts’ definitions (Donnellan et al., 2022). In their work, the research team asked adult volunteers to define interest and, separately, to define curiosity. The team then compared participants’ responses to experts’ definitions of the same terms, finding that participants and researchers agreed that curiosity refers to the active seeking of specific information, whereas interest was more often described as pleasurable and in-depth compared to curiosity.
Although the results of Aslan et al. (2021) and Donnellan et al. (2022) offer an influential roadmap for work in this area, as with every empirical project, there were limitations impacting the interpretation of results as a function of the study design. Determining a consensus on the definition of curiosity will come in part by exploring this construct across contexts, samples of participants, research team positionalities, and study designs. In the Aslan- and Donnellan-led studies, participants were explicitly told that the research team was investigating differences in the definitions of curiosity and interest, which may have primed the volunteers to conjure distinct definitions of the terms even if they do not distinguish between the constructs in their own daily lives. Additionally, the data were collected via a free response item in an online survey, meaning the research team could not follow up to ask clarifying or probing questions. One further limitation is that participants were recruited through various study volunteer recruitment programs (e.g., Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic), rather than students actively in, or thinking about, a learning context during data collection.
Considering how non-researchers define key terms is, in our (the authors’) opinions, a necessary perspective: scholars must understand the meaning that participants are imbuing into the terminology that they use, and respond to, when completing researchers’ measures. However, unlike Aslan et al. (2021), we contend that academics can, and should, maintain distinctions between the terms, even if their participants do not. In this study, we set out not to redefine or better define curiosity, but to document when and how “curiosity” was used by our participant group, so as to inform the field’s future collection and analyses of data. Doing so may contribute to, for example, improved measures that focus on the aspects of curiosity identified as salient by participants but not previously studied. Additionally, research in this area would benefit from data beyond self-report, as much work to date has focused on participants’ responses to surveys reflecting on their experiences, rather than capturing in-the-moment or behavioral data.
We conducted this work at a college preparatory and therapeutic high school exclusively serving students with emotional and behavioral disorders, the context of which is described in more detail below. Because students at this high school have significant practice talking about their feelings and affective experiences, they made an ideal group with which to partner for this study. Further, given the oft-discussed and, in some cases, documented underrepresentation of students with disabilities in educational psychology studies (e.g., Emery et al., 2022; Menendez & Gelman, 2024; Sheridan et al., 2023), it is critical that the growing empirical body of evidence regarding curiosity explicitly includes this group. We pursued the following research questions:
How do students with emotional and behavioral disabilities describe their experiences of curiosity?
What do these students describe doing during and after experiencing curiosity?
Are the behaviors students report engaging in when feeling curious observable in the classroom?
Methods
Epistemological Guiding Framework
In this multiple methods case study, we were guided by a constructivist epistemology. This means that our goal is not to distill the phenomenon of curiosity to its essence, or to understand how the individual participants in our studies made meaning from their experiences of curiosity. We aim for the results we present to make no claims about the nature of curiosity itself. Instead, we present data about how students describe curiosity, and offer comparisons between these descriptions to various academic definitions of the construct outlined above, so that the scholarly community can consider the implications of having a shared understanding of the construct with their samples for future work.
Study Design
The larger, multi-year project from which we conducted this analysis was informed by Control Value Theory (Pekrun, 2006) and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2020), which is reflected in the interview protocols we developed and the instruments we selected (the parts of the interviews that were related to Self-Determination Theory are covered in other articles; for example, Louick & Emery, 2024). The data used in the current study represent a subset of the larger data corpus from a project on math and science learning; as such, these data were collected exclusively in a math class and a science class, although content was not the focus of this particular study. For this analysis, we followed Merriam’s (1998) approach to case studies. Merriam’s (1998) approach uses case study methodology to investigate “a phenomenon of some sort bounded within a social context” (p. 27). In the present study, the phenomenon is curiosity, bounded within the social context of our partner school. We used descriptive, process, pattern, and axial coding methods to analyze the interview data; we used descriptive coding again with the video data (see “Data Analysis”). We present a summary of how our study design meets Merriam’s approach to case studies in Table 1.
Authors’ Approach to Meeting Merriam’s (2002) Criteria for Case Studies
Note. This table is organized following the components described by Merriam (2002) and summarized by Yazan (2015)
Credibility
Although “validity” is not a concern of many qualitative approaches to inquiry outside of the post-positivist tradition (see Schwandt et al., 2007), systematicity, rigor, and transparency are key quality indicators for these projects. Merriam (1998) writes that an assumption of non-positivistic work using qualitative methods “is that reality is holistic, multidimensional, and ever-changing; it is not a single, fixed, objective phenomenon waiting to be discovered, observed, and measured” (p. 202). Merriam offers several strategies for demonstrating credibility of analysis; for example, participatory research and disclosure of researcher biases. This study was conducted at a school with which the second author has a long-standing, mutually respectful and beneficial partnership. The larger project and other collaborative activities are informed (and, in many cases, directed) by the school’s administrators and participating teachers (e.g., Louick & Emery, 2024; Louick & Wang, 2021; Wang & Louick, 2020).
Merriam also suggests that researchers account for the lenses they bring to data collection, analysis, and interpretation, which we (Emery and Louick) will do in several of the following sections via positionality statements and transparent descriptions of the axiology informing our results. Further, Merriam suggests that researchers provide an audit trail. Following below, we present exemplars of our coding techniques in text and tables, and present data from participants in our Results section (additional, anonymized data are available upon request). We triangulated our findings with the use of multiple interviews and the classroom observations we conducted. Interviewing the participants on multiple occasions enabled us to see whether there were consistencies between the participants’ statements at different times; observing in the classrooms provided an opportunity to see if the interview statements were borne out in classroom actions. We also engaged in a round of coding in which we specifically looked for counterexamples or counterstories. Further, members of the school team involved in the larger project have seen versions of these analyses prior to public dissemination, which we present with their approval.
Positionality
Researchers’ embodied experiences necessarily shape the ways they plan studies, collect data with and from participants, engage in analyses, and interpret data (Boveda & Annamma, 2023; Lauterbach et al., 2022). As such, it is important to note the following: I (Emery) identify as a white-appearing, cisgender, monolingual woman. A former special education teacher, I now work at a public, research-intensive university with a commitment to improving access to resources and opportunities for people in Iowa. I approach research with the belief that the unearned privileges afforded to me—as a function of, for instance, the way I am racialized as white—carry with it responsibilities to (1) name power structures that contribute to the invisibilization of marginalized communities and (2) interrogate how knowledge is processed and produced. I endorse the sociopolitical model of disability, which posits that “disability is not a personal defect or deficiency, but rather primarily the product of a disabling environment” (Hahn, 1991, p. 17). It is my belief that the field of educational psychology has actively harmed the learning experiences of students with disabilities through both a history of eugenics and explicit exclusion in studies that otherwise aim to generate “universal” theories. As such, the focus of my program of research is to consider whether and how current work in the field of educational psychology adequately accounts for the experiences of students with disabilities, and how the scholarly body of empirical evidence related to learning and motivation could be improved with better representation. In this particular study, I operated under the assumption that our participants had unique insights to share, were the experts on their own experiences, and were the population best positioned to help our research team answer the research questions we identified as a gap in the literature.
I (Louick) identify as a White, cisgender and monolingual woman without disabilities, working at a public university, with prior experience as a middle and high school special education teacher. I share in the first author’s beliefs about the ways in which people like myself, who are privileged in terms of race, ethnicity, and disability status, have a critical responsibility to identify power structures and question forms of knowledge. I see merit in both the functional/environmental and the sociopolitical models of disability (Smart & Smart, 2006). I am particularly interested in ways we can improve educational opportunities for adolescents with learning disabilities: both by training teachers to recognize and address motivational challenges, and by developing innovative instructional materials and learning environments.
As an undergraduate student and passionate future educator, I (Stelter) was excited to join the first two authors on this project. As a preservice teacher in the process of earning my special education endorsement, the opportunity to spend time exploring the field of Educational Psychology was a way for me to engage early in professional development, lifelong learning, and my overall commitment to bettering myself as an educator. Both the opportunity to participate in the authorship process and my interest in education more generally were, and will continue to be, influenced by the identities that I hold. As a neurotypical, white, cisgendered male, the rural and suburban schooling systems I attended were, in many ways, designed specifically for someone like me to succeed. I recognize the privilege that a system of that design that affords someone like me, not only to earn a degree in Higher Education, but to navigate the space in a way that allows for the opportunity to participate in a different function of Iowa State University’s purpose.
Setting
The data for this study were collected at Alcott School (a pseudonym), an independent, therapeutic day school for students with emotional disabilities and other learning support needs. Alcott boasts an extraordinary 100% graduation rate and a 100% college placement rate, compared to national rates for students with disabilities of 40% and 37.5% respectively. Located in one of the largest cities in the United States, Alcott provides students with small class sizes, and a daily “student prep” period during which they can go to any of their teachers for academic support. So as to facilitate a feeling of community, students refer to their teachers (and all other staff) on a first-name basis. Students also have access to a counseling center available to them on-demand. It is common for students to come and go from the counseling center as needed; teachers prepare for the daily possibility that at least some of their students will need to leave for at least part of the class period. Alcott offers the same slate of courses as might be expected at any other high school, including Advanced Placement courses, but also has the flexibility to offer courses another school cannot. For example, three of the five students who took part in this study were taking a course called “Scientific Literacy,” in which they studied how to distinguish between evidence-based science and misinformation.
Participants
In Merriam’s (1998) approach to case studies, participants are purposively sampled, driven by the framing literature and research question. We recruited one math and one science teacher, Matthew and Harrison (pseudonyms), who shared students to participate in a larger project exploring student affect and motivation in math and science learning. The teachers had classes ranging in size from five to 10 students, depending on the level of academic support students required, as well as who was present at school and/or in the counseling center. For this analysis, we purposively sampled students shared by both teachers. Five of their students agreed with parental consent to participate; we call them Irving, Justin, Katherine, Lydia, and Mark in this study (see Table 2 for student demographics). As required for enrollment at Alcott, participating students all had emotional or behavioral disorder diagnoses thus qualifying them for the therapeutic services at Alcott, indicating they have practice talking about their affective experiences. Individual students also disclosed dyscalculia, dyslexia, and ADHD.
Student Demographics
Data Collection
Interviews
Across 1 month (May 9–June 8, 2022), students participated in three interviews lasting between 30 and 60 minutes, conducted during their prep period in a private space that the Alcott administration arranged for the project. All interviews were semi-structured (Miles et al., 2014) and conducted via Zoom. Interview questions were refined during a pilot study conducted at Alcott the prior year, following Merriam’s (1998) guidelines for interview protocols. One member of the research team met with each student individually for each interview, and took an audio recording of the conversation. In our first interview, we asked students questions related to their emotions and motivation during science and math learning (across their lives, but also in Matthew’s and Harrison’s classes, specifically). In the second interview, we engaged the participants in a “think aloud” about common math and science learning activities they experienced in their classrooms, and asked them to describe how they might think, feel, and act during those scenarios. The third interview involved responding to the items from the Learning Climate Questionnaire (Williams & Deci, 1996). We encouraged students to elaborate verbally on the answer options they chose with examples first from their math class with Matthew, and then their science class with Harrison. This interview technique, which can be described as cognitive interview with emergent probes (Beatty & Willis, 2007), is necessary when researchers want to determine participants’ conceptions of survey items (e.g., Karabenick et al., 2007). The students completed the interview protocols in the same order.
Classroom observations
To address our third research question (“Are the behaviors students report engaging in when feeling curious observable in the classroom?”), we collected video recordings of students’ math and science classes. The inclusion of classroom observations was particularly important, as it enabled us to determine if students feel curious in compulsory learning situations. Five sessions were audio- and video-recorded for each of the three classes (two sections of Matthew’s math classes that included student study participants, and Harrison’s science class that included those same students) for a total of 15 class videos. The lessons took place between May 24 and June 2, 2022, within the same month that the interviews took place. In all classes, students spent most of the class time working on their final projects. Harrison’s students were engaged in research projects about the facts that could be used to debunk unsubstantiated theories (“Flat Earth,” extrasensory perception, etc.); over this set of 5 days, the students were taking turns presenting their preliminary findings to their classmates and receiving feedback meant to prepare them for their final project. Matthew’s students were working on a final project related to architectural drawing; they used mathematical concepts they had learned throughout the year to design either a dream room (students with intermediate math proficiency) or a dream floor of a building (students with advanced math proficiency). The students in the advanced class spent 2 days finishing up a trigonometry unit, and then moved on to their final project for the remaining three classes.
In all of these classes, final projects were multi-step, ongoing endeavors that had been broken down into concrete steps. Opportunities for feedback from peers and teacher were built into the projects. In Harrison’s class, students were using a rubric to “grade” their classmates’ presentations, and a specific question-and-answer period was built into the end of the presentation time. Opportunities for student choice were also built into all settings. Harrison allowed the students to choose their unsubstantiated theory of choice, and to decide the manner in which they wanted to present their final project (traditional paper, slides, etc.). Matthew allowed the students to choose the space they wanted for their architectural drawing, as well as what pieces of furniture they wanted in their space.
Because of the second author’s long-standing research relationship with the school, the students were accustomed to video-recording taking place in school classrooms; in addition, student assent and parent consent forms assured participants and families that they could opt out of recording at any time. Although some may worry that students changed their behavior due to the presence of video recording equipment, we captured one instance of a student asking which project the camera was for and several instances of students making routine requests of their teachers to access normal school supports and resources, suggesting the students did not feel inhibited by the video recording. Initial transcripts were completed by a transcription service; Louick then went through the transcripts and compared them with the videos themselves, making corrections for accuracy. We did not include exchanges between any non-consented students and consented/assented participants or the teachers in our final transcriptions.
Data Analysis
We began data analysis by conducting four rounds of coding on the students’ individual interviews. Note that in keeping with our methodological protocol (e.g., Merriam, 1998) we designed all coding processes to involve coming to consensus, instead of establishing interrater reliability, so as to fully align ourselves with those researchers who acknowledge and value the interpretivist nature of qualitative study designs (O’Connor & Joffe, 2020; Saldaña, 2013), promoting “depth of insight” over “facilitating agreement” (Braun & Clarke, 2021, p. 238). Additionally, we note that working with five participants necessarily shapes the interpretive reach of the study. Rather than aiming for statistical generalization, our analysis offers a contextually grounded account of participants’ perspectives and practices.
Descriptive coding
The first and second author began by reading through all of the students’ transcripts by round (e.g., the first interviews we conducted with students, then the second, and then the third). Having familiarized ourselves with the entire data corpus, we focused our analyses on the units of meaning within the students’ interview responses that were related to curiosity and/or interest. These included any time the students used terms such as “curious,” “curiosity,” “interest,” “interested,” or “interesting,” in relation to their current science and math classes, as well as times when they otherwise described instances when they felt curious about something in math or science learning more broadly. As Merriam (1998) describes data analysis as a recursive and interactive process, we met regularly to compare our selections, resolving any discrepancies by consensus to ensure we were conducting subsequent rounds of analyses on exactly the same units of meaning. We then completed this same descriptive coding on the transcripts from our teacher interviews.
Process and pattern coding
In our second round of data analysis, we conducted simultaneous rounds of pattern and process coding. Emery led the pattern coding, pulling together related material into “more meaningful and parsimonious unit[s] of analysis;” (Saldaña, 2013, p. 210). Louick led the process coding (identifying actions with gerunds, or “-ing words,” that students said they engaged in; Charmaz, 2002; Saldaña, 2013). Although we each took the lead on one type of coding, we took supporting roles in the other coding protocol to determine reliability of the codes developed. We met regularly to review and refine codes, repeating our coding protocols until our separate coding efforts resulted in concurrence for both sets of codes. Exemplars for each are presented in Tables 3 (process codes) and 4 (pattern codes).
Examples of Process Coding
Examples of Pattern Coding
Axial coding
Although most typically associated with grounded theory, we chose to employ axial coding (Charmaz, 2006) to organize and draw connections between the process and pattern codes that we developed in the previous round of coding. This resulted in five categories. The first included codes related to the role of the teacher in students’ descriptions of feeling curious. The remaining categories were each related to the student experience of feeling curious, and included students describing where knowledge is held, the importance of multiple sources or viewpoints, personal reasons for pursuing resolution to a knowledge gap, and actions taken to pursue deeper or additional knowledge. An exemplar is presented in Table 5.
Overview of Axial Coding
Final round of interview coding
In our final round of coding interview transcripts, we reviewed the entire data corpus of transcripts explicitly looking for counterexamples or alternative explanations. We also specifically looked for instances in which the students described a lack of curiosity and/or interest.
Coding class meetings
In the process of analyzing the interview transcripts, we identified actions that individual students claimed to engage in when they were feeling curious about a math- or science-related learning opportunity. Although some actions could not be tracked from our classroom data (e.g., doing independent research at home about a topic that sparked curiosity), others, such as the action of asking questions (which Mark, Justin, and Katherine all said they did when they were curious) were observable in the course of daily classroom activity. Thus, we reviewed the class meeting transcripts to capture whether (and when) students engaged in the observable behaviors they described in their interviews. This additional analysis allowed for possible triangulation of findings from the interview portion of the study, and also highlighted and clarified the difficulty of tracking curiosity-related behaviors in real time. A list of the behaviors we aimed to observe appears in Table 6.
Behaviors Reported by Students When Feeling Curious
Transparency and openness
Additional information about the interviews and coding processes not included in this manuscript or accompanying tables are available upon request. This includes de-identified data and the research team’s full codebook. This study was not preregistered.
Findings
The purpose of our study was to gather information about how students define and use the term “curiosity,” so as to inform research that enables educators to promote students’ experiences of curiosity. We present our findings as related to each research question.
Research Question 1
Our first research question asked how students who are adept at reflecting on and talking about their emotional experiences because of their EBD diagnoses described their experiences of curiosity. We generated four overarching themes across participants’ descriptions.
Students used the terms “interest” and “curiosity” interchangeably
In our original interview protocol, we were explicit about using the word “curiosity” instead of interest. However, when we asked participants something specific about experiences of curiosity, the students often referenced “interest” or “interesting” in their response. An example of this appears in the following exchange between Justin and a researcher:
So have you ever had the experience in class where your teacher says something, or they give you an activity, and you find yourself feeling really curious about that topic or that activity?
This year specifically has been really interesting for me in terms of like learning how logical fallacies work; how debates and like, scientific debates work and also learning like, the like, fundamentals of a certain scientific concepts that are like, uh, disputed a lot.
Here, we see Justin was asked about times he felt curious, and he responded describing something he thought was “interesting” in science class. In other words, Justin described feelings and experiences that are consistent with an educational psychologist’s conception of “curious,” even though he labeled it as relating to the “interest” construct. In our analyses, we counted 35 instances of students being asked explicitly about curiosity, and responding using the words “interest” or “interesting.”
Students described teacher actions that facilitated curiosity
Given our focus on curiosity at school throughout the interviews, it made sense that students often discussed teachers and their roles in exposing students to content and facilitating their curiosity; as Irving said, “if I wasn’t forced to do it, I wouldn’t get interested in it.” As we looked across the data, we saw three primary ways that students connected their teachers to their experiences of curiosity, all of which are consistent with other findings in the extant literature. The first was connecting material to students’ own experiences; Justin said he experienced this frequently during scientific literacy class, as Harrison ensured that everyone in the class had “a base understanding, and then using that [for students] to know what is and isn’t misinformation.” In other words, Justin felt that Harrison established a common set of knowledge to which they could compare things they had learned or believed previously. The second was focusing on how the content could be applied and used in real life: Lydia said specifically that if the material at hand “is something that I’m able to apply . . . that kind of piques my interest more;” she went on to explain that during trigonometry, “my teacher had brought up how you can apply what we’re learning to . . . find out where people are through cell phone calls.” The third was designing appropriately challenging tasks. For example, when asked how he would feel if he was asked to build a model of a rainforest in class, Mark said, “I’d probably not want to build the model, ’cause that sounds difficult. But I’ll do it because it sounds like an interesting challenge.”
Students described curiosity in terms of becoming knowledgeable
Although Pekrun (2006) does not make specific ontological claims about whether knowledge is pre-existing or is generated, CVT helps explain the dynamic processes in which students engage to assess the perceived control over and valuing for their learning. Our study participants described curiosity with an underlying assumption that if they encountered a gap in their knowledge, they could fill it with knowledge that already existed. In other words, they described curiosity as accessing extant knowledge, rather than generating something entirely new. This reflects the control they felt (e.g., they were capable of accessing knowledge, or they had access to knowledge) and valuing (if the knowledge was something they wanted). One clear example of this came when students spoke of accessing knowledge of a field new to them. Justin talked about how curious he was when Harrison mentioned subjects that he (Justin) had never heard of before. Similarly, Mark and Lydia both talked about the experience of learning that multiple fields existed within psychology, and how learning about these fields made them curious enough that they ended up doing their own research outside of traditional class time. Students also described curiosity to learn how someone else thinks, especially when presented with a point of view they had not considered before. For example, Mark said: “I’d be like ‘Whoa, no way,’ and then I look more into it, and then make my decision on what I think of it later.”
Additionally, students described drawing connections between classes; for example, Justin described how fundamental concepts he learned about scientific literacy applied to other academic subjects. They also described understanding contextual differences in word meaning, as when Irving reported seeking out new definitions for words he heard in unfamiliar contexts. Further, students aimed to situate knowledge within its cultural context, as reflected in Lydia’s curiosity about the history of math and where fundamental math concepts came from.
Students described curiosity in terms of the impetus for pursuing a resolution to their knowledge gap
In line with Pekrun’s (2006) CVT, in which epistemic emotions are thought to arise in situations related to knowledge acquisition, our participants distinguished between pursuing knowledge to fulfill an obligation (e.g., to complete an assigned task) and pursuing knowledge for other reasons. It was the latter that participants described as related to curiosity. Additionally, the students were able to make distinctions between intensities of curiosity, describing being mildly curious or deeply curious for varying reasons. For example, they described being curious about learning for the sake of having fun (e.g., “[Listening to a guest speaker] would be fun . . . because they would have a lot of knowledge about the topic and I would be able to learn from them”), but also for purposes such as knowing more about topics related to personal or professional goals (e.g., “Engineering is something I wanna do eventually, so I love hands-on projects. I would 110% do that [build a model of the rainforest]”).
There were also times when students described curiosity to engage with ideas that affected them or society on a deeper level. Students talked about curiosities related to their own identity beliefs, and Mark went so far as to describe curiosity-related learning as a means of maintaining a peaceful society: “I believe knowledge is power. It’s the most powerful thing on the planet. . . . I believe that learning and intelligence is what keeps us from falling into violence.” For Mark, pursuing resolution to knowledge gaps in topics he was curious about was akin to a moral obligation. Other students also described significant reasons for pursuing their curiosity. For example, Justin described feeling curious as prompting him to “ask questions, even if it’s not necessarily relevant to the [classroom task] itself,” indicating that pursuing a resolution to his knowledge gaps helps him make connections across his world. The value of establishing tangential connections across fields of knowledge came up for Katherine, too, who said, I feel like being able to discuss questions that are maybe—well, I know that schools have discussions, but you know–being able to discuss freely what you are, like, learning about, and also ask questions about maybe something a little unrelated but also connected, is something that I think is a little undervalued.
For Katherine, asking questions to close initial knowledge gaps helped her determine whether she would continue to pursue knowledge of that topic—stated differently, getting answers to her initial questions about topics that made her feel curious helped her determine her level of investment in pursuing a topic further.
It is worth noting that while students spent a great deal of time discussing their curiosity to fill their own knowledge gaps with existing information, the dataset did not contain any examples of students describing a sense of curiosity to generate something new: that is, something that had never been identified before.
Research Question 2
Having established how students described the experience of feeling curiosity in their math and science classes, we next captured what students reported doing during and after those experiences of curiosity. In all, we captured 11 distinct actions that can be summarized in two major ways: seeking additional information, and spending more time with ideas via self-directed and -initiated exploration of course concepts outside of the classroom (see Table 5 for an overview).
Seeking additional information
Students reported seeking information about their topics of curiosity. Three students (Mark, Irving, and Katherine) described recording information about which they were curious for the purposes of planning (and ultimately completing) additional research after class. Three students (Justin, Katherine, and Mark) said that they asked follow-up questions of others, with Justin and Katherine specifying teachers, peers, and/or parents. The students varied in what they sought. For example, Lydia specified that she wanted connections between what she felt curious about in class and the outside world, echoing Justin’s goal to understand how the topics he felt curious about in school applied in other contexts as we described above. Mark, by contrast, prioritized gathering multiple perspectives on the topics he felt curious about.
Spending more time with ideas
Relatedly, Irving and Katherine talked about the actions they took when they felt curious as a means of spending more time with those ideas. For these students, this meant extending their learning through independent inquiry, outside of class time and using their own resources (e.g., internet sources they evaluated and selected, etc.). This implies that the time our participants spend may not be on gathering additional or extended information, but rather continuing to engage with the original topics.
Research Question 3
Finally, we analyzed the classroom meetings to determine if the actions the students said they took when they felt curious were observable in the video recordings. By integrating students’ self-reported experiences of curiosity with classroom observations, the study offers a more complete account of curiosity as both a subjective experience and a situated practice. Students described these actions differently, although there were some commonalities among the behaviors they described. Lydia reflected that she first acknowledged or recognized her curiosity, and then would seek connections between what she was learning in class and the world outside of the classroom. Mark also indicated that he would do additional, independent research on topics he was curious about, with the explicit goal of recognizing multiple perspectives on those topics. Mark further reported that he would ask questions about the topics he was curious about, but did not specify to whom these questions would be directed (e.g., teachers, peers, other resources).
Similarly, Irving described doing independent research on topics he became curious about, framed as spending more time on the content (e.g., self-directed, self-initiated independent inquiry). For Irving, the exchange of time was worth the benefit of the knowledge he attained through his independent research. Justin reported that he would “actually do the work” for topics he felt curious about; that is, rather than engage in additional research or spend more time on the subject outside of class, he indicated that he would participate more fully in work already assigned within the context of the classroom. Within the classroom context, Justin also indicated he would ask questions of the teacher in an effort to extend the content beyond the lesson. Stated differently, he asked questions about content about which he felt curious so that the teacher would make connections between the assigned material or planned lesson and the real world. Whereas other students reported following up on topics they felt curious about at home in self-directed ways, Justin did not report engaging in this same self-initiated inquiry; he just asked extending or connecting questions of the teacher in class. Like Mark, Irving, and Justin, Katherine similarly indicated that she would ask questions in class if she felt curious about a topic, extend the content beyond the context of the lesson, and do independent research. All students were able to describe specific examples of taking these actions in the past.
In order to fully address the third research question, “Are the behaviors students report engaging in when feeling curious observable in the classroom?” we relied not just on student interviews, but on videos of them in the classroom during five class periods. Some of the actions students described are not possible to observe in the classroom; for example, we were not able to capture students in their homes conducting their own independent research on topics they learned about in class. We were, however, able to observe asking questions. Although both indicated that they ask questions when feeling curious, we did not find examples of this in Mark’s or Katherine’s classroom behavior across the observed class meetings. We did capture Justin asking questions in class on a regular basis. Some of those questions were related to curiosity: for example, while Group A was working on their architecture project, Justin asked, “Would it be too late for the U.S. to just embrace the metric system now?” Of the 66 questions that Justin asked across the 15 class meetings, 11 of those questions were clearly related to curiosity. The others were clarifying questions about the content or teacher’s instructions, or procedural questions about the task or classroom.
Discussion
In a 2014 special section of Journal of Educational Psychology, LeBaron Wallace and Kuo argued that theory advancement in and practical value of education research are often stymied by methodological silos. The findings of our work exemplify the kind of scholarly progress gained from incorporating multiple methods and qualitative approaches to current questions. As researchers aim to distinguish curiosity from other constructs, or work to promote curiosity among students, it is critical that our measures accurately account for how participants are thinking about these constructs. The participants in our study provided several notable insights that may be helpful to scholars aiming to refine the construct of curiosity, and distinguish it from related constructs. While the study is based on a relatively small number of participants (N = 5), this scale enabled our sustained engagement with both interview and observational data, supporting a detailed exploration of how students describe and experience curiosity through multiple and varied rounds of data collection. The findings are therefore intended to be interpreted as context-sensitive and illustrative. We begin by summarizing the implications of the results of each research question (RQ).
Theoretical Implications
RQ1
We first asked, “How do these students, who have emotional and behavioral disabilities, describe their experiences of curiosity?” We chose this group purposively because of their significant practice reflecting on and describing their emotional experiences, deliberately positioning them as a group we can learn from. Perhaps most significantly, the students in our study used the terms “curiosity” and “interest” interchangeably, even though our research team explicitly asked about curiosity. In other work led by Aslan et al. (2021) participants distinguished between curiosity and interest, but they were explicitly prompted to do so by the research team. Further, students in our study only swapped “interest” for curiosity; they did not use other synonyms for curiosity. The authors of prior work on epistemic emotions (e.g., Fayn et al., 2019; Noordewier & Gocłowska, 2024; Vogl et al., 2019, ) have suggested that epistemic emotions such as confusion and surprise are often triggered in the same ways that curiosity is triggered, and can function similarly to curiosity (for example, by prompting knowledge-attaining behaviors). Because our students used the terms “curiosity” and “interest” interchangeably, but did not swap in any other terms (such as “surprise” or “confusion”), we conclude that curiosity and other epistemic emotions seem to be sufficiently distinct for our participants in ways that curiosity and interest are not.
A further implication of the current study is that students can (and, in the case of our participants, do) distinguish between passing fancies and connecting to a higher virtue. Many of the curiosity studies to date, especially those conducted in controlled laboratory environments rather than in classrooms, have asked participants to engage with relatively arbitrary information. What remains to be untangled is whether researchers in lab settings are actually measuring a drive to attain information informed solely by cognitive incongruence, or truly the experience of curiosity (and the relationship/distinction between those two constructs). In other words, greater information is needed about whether the participants themselves would define their experience as one of curiosity if the term were not supplied by the research team. A related empirical question is whether lab-based studies hold the same ecological validity as those conducted with students in their actual classrooms, navigating content that they have a vested stake in learning. The next phase of curiosity research should aim to capture student descriptions of their experiences of curiosity while they are in authentic learning situations that require them to engage with information they either must learn or choose to learn.
RQ2
Second, we asked, “What do these students describe doing during and after experiencing curiosity?” Some of the current scholarly consensus about curiosity is reflected in our findings regarding students’ self-reported actions during and after experiencing curiosity. For example, students described curiosity as prompting knowledge-seeking behaviors, like doing their own research about topics outside of class. Importantly, students in our study shared that they weigh a drive-to-know against other motivational considerations, such as whether they value the knowledge or it feels worth the time they would need to engage in more research about a topic outside of class. Students discussed valuing knowledge as being clearly connected to out-of-classroom life, practical applications, and their career goals. As such, future work might investigate students’ experiences of curiosity in relation to motivational frameworks like Eccles’s and Wigfield’s situated expectancy-value theory (2020). Although valuing is obviously a central component of Pekrun’s (2006) CVT, the dimensions and types of valuing vary across CVT and expectancy-value frameworks.
Embedded in students’ descriptions of curiosity, we also found an epistemological assumption that the knowledge they sought was “out there” for them to attain. That is, students did not describe feeling curious in terms of needing to generate knowledge. Philosopher Adam Morton’s (2010) suggestions about the nature of curiosity support this claim; he writes, “When you are curious about something, you want to know the truth about it. You don’t just want to have a belief, and perhaps even not just a belief that happens to be true,” (p. 392; emphasis original). This line of thinking suggests that knowledge is an external, objective entity that can be discovered or acquired, rather than something constructed or generated through personal engagement or exploration. Such an argument aligns with the students’ perceptions of curiosity as a process of uncovering pre-existing truths, rather than one of active, creative knowledge generation. According to Morton, the curiosity-driven desire to “know the truth” underscores an assumption that knowledge exists independently of the inquirer, and the pursuit of curiosity is framed as a quest to access or reveal this external truth.
From this, Morton develops the idea of a “professional knower,” describing those who have occupations (e.g., detective, researcher) that require knowledge-seeking, even if the individual may be dispassionate or disinterested about the topic. Morton suggests that such “professional knowers” can engage in knowledge-attainment behaviors without being curious at all, if they have sufficient, non-epistemic reasons to perform them. The fact that the participating students assumed that their role was to learn information that already exists, as opposed to creating new knowledge, suggests that individuals who are students in compulsory schooling may think of themselves as the kind of professional knowers described by Morton. That is, they are “motivated . . . because it is part of the job description,” to attain knowledge, rather than for personal edification or enjoyment (Morton, 2010; p. 13). Professional knowers, Morton argues, are often tasked with finding answers that will please their bosses; in the case of students, perhaps their teachers or caregivers. Curiosity as an activating, intrinsically motivating experience may be tempered for learners required to be both present and learning the content assigned. Researchers should recognize the limitations of data collected in such contexts, regardless of the type of data collection measure used.
RQ3
Finally, we asked, “Are the behaviors students report engaging in when feeling curious observable in the classroom?” Student interviews revealed that many of the behaviors that students described initiating when they felt curious happened at home. Given that our data source for RQ3 was in-classroom observations, we were unable to track the nature of their outside-of-school responses to curiosity. Further, our classroom observations did not reveal many instances of the other behaviors students described initiating when feeling curious beyond asking questions. This has implications for future research: it will likely require study teams to design protocols for data collection that can happen in students’ homes (e.g., experience sampling methodologies or diary studies). Whereas Hidi and Renninger (2019) claimed that teachers’ attempts to prompt curiosity among their students was not likely to result in “self-initiated information” seeking that leads to “longer term, deep involvement with content,” our findings suggest that instances of curiosity at school do, in fact, lead to self-initiated information seeking, and raise the empirical question of whether and how long students stay engaged with those topics.
Further reflecting on Morton’s (2010) analysis of curiosity, in which he argues that a desire for accuracy is inherent to feeling curious, our results raise concerns about the quality of information and sources students might engage with when exploring ideas at home. Sinatra, Lombardi, and their colleagues (e.g., Herrick et al., 2023; Sinatra & Lombardi, 2020) have detailed both the reach and strength of misinformation posturing as fact, and the skills required of individuals to make plausibility judgments. This also has implications for practice, as supporting and encouraging students’ curiosity will require ensuring that students have the skills needed to critically evaluate the sources they find.
Implications of the Study Design
No research endeavor can be truly objective; each project is rooted in epistemological claims that reflect the contingent, social nature of our work (Backhaus, 2019). Researchers are also guided by axiological commitments that are made covert when we attempt the appearance of objectivity (e.g., Brown & Malone, 2004). For example, in other work (e.g., Emery et al., 2022) we have established that researchers in educational psychology and related fields tend to take one of three approaches when soliciting participants: they specifically exclude SWD from study samples, they do not explicitly determine if any participants in their sample are SWD, or they include SWD only to make comparisons to typically developing peers. Each approach is a political statement, regardless of whether researchers have reflected on this deeply. These approaches can signal, for instance, that disability is not of value to understand, too much of a burden for research teams to unpack, or only of use to establish normality and understand deviance.
In this project, we (the authors) aim to be overt about our axiology, and demonstrate how acknowledging the subjective nature of research can advance the field. We noted that working with these particular participants (high school students with emotional and learning support needs) in this particular setting (a high school designed to provide them with easy access to high-quality therapeutic supports) afforded insights that spoke to the larger theory and construct development process regarding curiosity. We benefited from access to this population, as these students’ regular practice of talking about their feelings broadly facilitated our discussions of epistemic emotions with them. By virtue of the fact that these students had disabilities which required them to become adept at talking about their emotions, they were able to convey a rich insight into their inner worlds. As such, in this work, we aim to turn a move oft-used in discussion sections of research manuscripts (e.g., Emery et al., 2022) on its head: future research in this area should include typically developing students to determine whether they too have the skills to discuss their emotions at the same level of quality, and whether the results we present here map on to those students’ experiences of curiosity.
Additionally, as part of our (the authors’) axiological commitments, we believe our participants are the experts on their own experiences. As such, we conclude that participants Mark and Lydia, who did not ask questions across the class sessions we observed after indicating that they would if they felt curious, in fact did not feel curious during our data collection. In its work on the nature of curiosity, the field has established that this emotion is positively-valenced (that is, appealing and attractive, as opposed to aversive; Pekrun, 2006). Its activating nature is associated with students’ use of self-regulation strategies (e.g., Muis et al., 2015), which are themselves well-associated with persistence and achievement (e.g., Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). As such, one area of future research could include critically examining learning contexts to promote opportunities for students to feel curious and act on their experiences of curiosity. Perhaps another could be unpacking the implications of Morton’s (2010) notion of a professional knower within the context of students in classrooms. Whether students need or ought to feel curious at all is an empirical question.
Conclusion
As scholars continue to untangle curiosity from related constructs, this study may provide insights into future phenomenological work. First, researchers must find a balance between a definition shared by researchers of constructs, and recognizing that their study participants may not be defining terms the same way. In our study, this meant allowing participants to use “curiosity” and “interest” interchangeably in participant responses, but taking responsibility as researchers to align their stated beliefs to the definitions established in the extant literature. Second, researchers gain key insights by gathering information during and about participants’ lived experiences of curiosity (as opposed to general surveys). In the current study, such insights included the sometimes dispassionate nature of students’ curiosity (when they needed to seek information for the purposes of addressing topics assigned by their teacher/school/curriculum) and recognizing the need for additional sources of curiosity data beyond the classroom. We find ourselves curious to see where research in this area goes next, in the interest of pushing forward our common understanding of epistemic emotions, as well as the implications of those understandings for educators.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Authors
ALYSSA EMERY, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences at Iowa State University. Her research interests include achievement motivation among students with disabilities.
REBECCA LOUICK, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Eastern Michigan University. Her research explores academic motivation among adolescents with learning disabilities.
NICOLAS STELTER is an undergraduate Elementary Education major at Iowa State University. He is pursuing a teaching license with the goal of being a special education teacher.