Unleashing Curiosity with Challenging Learning Tasks
Unleashing Curiosity with Challenging Learning Tasks
When students believe that new knowledge is attainable, yet just beyond their fingertips, they’re motivated to learn. This guide offers insights and strategies teachers can use to create learning activities for students that are intellectually challenging and curiosity based.
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Research shows that “scaffolding learning”—providing students with learning that falls in their zone of proximal development (ZPD)—enhances their curiosity and motivation to learn, and learning itself. We also know from numerous studies that intellectual challenge—the desire to become better at something we care about—can be a powerful intrinsic motivator. This 8-page quick referenece guide for teachers provides research-based insights and practical guidance for designing student learning activities that increase cognitive demand, provide students with meaningful choice, and scaffold learning.
Our Unleashing Curiosity guides are part of McREL’s Curiosity Works® resources. Based in part on a successful system-wide effort in Melbourne, Australia that improved student achievement by unleashing student curiosity, these resources give teachers and school leaders tips, suggestions, and ideas to encourage professional dialogue with other teachers and increase student curiosity. Combining these insights with McREL’s analysis of best education practices from around the world, our Curiosity Works resources support a better way of transforming schools—not through top-down pressure, but through helping teachers and school leaders work together to develop shared professional expertise and leverage the power of motivation and curiosity.