Curiosity and the Development of Question Generation Skills

The current study investigates the relationship between children’s curiosity and question asking ability. Generation of two types of questions was assessed: identification (yes/no questions asked to identify a target from an array) and understanding questions, asked to learn more about a topic. The latter was related to children’s curiosity, as was the ability to recognize the effectiveness of questions in solving a mystery. Training on asking identification questions was effective in improving children’s ability to ask that type of question, but did not transfer to the other task. Training on asking understanding questions was not successful. Children’s curiosity did not influence the effectiveness of the training. Curiosity-Question Asking Relationship A primary instructional objective of most early science programs is to foster children’s scientific curiosity and question-asking skills (Jirout & Klahr, 2011). However, little is known about the relationship between curiosity and question-asking behavior. While curiosity and question asking are invariably mentioned in national and state standards and in most preschool science curricula, they are rarely assessed (National Research Council, 1996; Worth, 2010). Instead, science assessments typically focus on domain-specific content, rather than on domain-general skills like question-asking. In this paper, we describe our work investigating the relationship between preschool children’s curiosity and question asking, and assess the effectiveness of training children to ask different types of questions.