Curiosity – the “thirst for knowledge” – has long been known as a driving force for child development and knowledge acquisition. A child’s curiosity about the world around them is a predictor for their success in later life, from academic and workplace achievement, to creativity, social adjustment, and general wellbeing.

However, until now, research into the domain of curiosity has been hampered due to the lack of systematic studies accounting for the multi-faceted nature of curiosity and the many ways it manifests in children, in addition to individual differences in the triggers for curiosity within children. Psychologists have therefore faced the challenge of figuring out how to reliably capture all these varied behaviours and with that, to create a well-rounded “profile” of a person related to their curiosity.

To take on this challenge, Dr Marina Bazhydai has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Grant for the 5-year project, "Curiosity Battery: Developing a new toolkit for primary school children". Marina will be collaborating with Co-Investigator Dr Lily FitzGibbon from Stirling University, along with a research team, to embark on the journey of developing and validating a multidimensional assessment battery of curiosity in primary-school-age children. The research team plan to utilise this toolkit in longitudinal studies, delving into the complex relationship between children's curiosity, academic achievement, and psychological well-being.

The Curiosity Battery will incorporate behavioural tasks and self-report questionnaires to capture key theoretically derived dimensions and facets of curiosity. It will enable creating a curiosity profile for an individual child based on these different facets of curiosity. This will be then used to understand how individual differences in these facets relate to engagement in school, including risk for intellectual disengagement, learning and well-being, and to inform development of target interventions.

Dr Bazhydai said: “While the importance of curiosity in development is often assumed, systematic research into its value for academic and well-being outcomes is lacking. This is largely due to the paucity of reliable measures of curiosity in childhood incorporating different theoretical perspectives. We will develop a set of tasks and questionnaires that capture several aspects of primary school children’s curiosity – the Curiosity Battery. We will then investigate how different dimensions of curiosity are related to children’s school achievement and well-being. The validated digitised tool will be hosted on an online open-source platform and accessible to researchers and educators for use in a web browser. In this way, we will promote open and critical engagement of the research and practitioner community with the Curiosity Battery with the aim of improving the methodological practice in curiosity research”.

Research at Lancaster led by Dr Bazhydai in the Active Learning Lab focuses on ways to capture curiosity and wonder in children. Among other studies, including those conducted in the state-of-the-art developmental psychology research facility at LU, the Babylab, the team has recently validated a novel measure of primary school children’s wonder (the Wonder Chart) and a measure of primary school teachers’ ability to foster wonder in the classroom (the Wonder-full Education Questionnaire); the results from this work are currently being written up for peer-review publications.

This new research grant from the Leverhulme Trust will enable the team to take their work on curiosity to the next level to enable field-wide impact and engagement with communities of caregivers and school-age children.