Young children practice cognitive accommodation all the time. Think of a small child whose only experience with dogs is the little Shih Tzu of the family. One day, the child meets the neighbor’s great Danish. Wow! The mental concept of the “dog” child expands rapidly to include more shapes and sizes.
Cognitive accommodation is in the heart of good education: it is what allows students to build on previous knowledge to review, expand and deepen their understanding of a concept. As Summer Allen wrote in the White Paper “The Science of Awe”: “AWE’s ability to cause cognitive accommodation can also explain why humans evolved to experience this unique emotion. Expert AWE can be adaptable to take information to take information and adipaldes and US announcements sail our world.”
The connection of amazement curiosity
“One of my favorite findings suggests that AWE could help stimulate curiosity about the world,” said psychologist Craig Anderson. Anderson was part of a team that study How this emotion influenced adolescents. “The more astonished they felt, the more curiosity they expressed and the better they were done at school,” he said.
The astonishment is sometimes described as an “emotion of knowledge.” Paul Silvia, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, describes the emotions of knowledge as “a family of emotional states that foster learning, exploration and reflection.” These emotions include surprise, interest, confusion and astonishment and voice of experiences that are “unexpected, complicated and mentally challenging, and motivate learning in their broader sense.”
According to Silvia, AWE is a powerful educational tool because it motivates people to explore things that extend their understanding of the world. He wrote: “When people see beautiful and striking images of supernovae, black holes and planetary nebulas, they usually report feelings of astonishment and astonishment. These feel that they motivate them to learn about what they see and their scientific.”
When you wonder, you are learning
Nothing of this research would surprise Fred Rogers, for whom Wonder was pedagogy. I knew that curiosity is what children’s main brains to learn. He also had this incredible ability to communicate his own wonder through the screen, part of his fascination with his young spectators.
I contacted Greg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski, co -authors or When you wonder, you are learning: Lord Rogers lasting lessons to raise creative, curious and affectionate childrenTo listen more about what they learned when studying Rogers’s work. They told me:
When Fred Rogers sang the words, When you wonder, you are learningHey was joking. In a very real sense, he was right. We know for modern science that when we are in a wonderful state, something comes on in the brain. We begin to absorb all kinds of information. And the more curiosity we feel, the more we are more likely to retain that information. . . That is why some scientists think that curiosity can be as important as intelligence when it comes to the success of children in school.
According to researchers, curiosity has a “fundamental impact on learning and memory.” When children are curious, they are more motivated to learn and more experts in retaining information. Think of a four -year -old boy who knows the name of each dinosaur, a ten -year -old who can recite and explain the forceduras g of Russian mountain boxes, or a fourteen -year -old boy who has memorized everyone Hamilton Lyric. No teacher has assigned this work. The four -year -old boy went to a natural history museum and was hypnotized by the huge skeletons. The ten -year -old rose his first roller coaster and was fascinated by the feeling and physics of everything. The fourteen -year -old never listened to a musical or a story, like this, so they continued listening. Amazing, curiosity, learning, memory.
Here is another fantastic finding: curiosity has an amplifier effect on other Learning. A study by the University of California, Davis, found that when the participants were curious about the initial information presented to them, they could more easily absorb unrelated information. Simply being in a curious mental state helped the brains of the particles to memorize the material that were less excited. As the main author of the study, Matthias Gruber said: “Curiosity can put the brain in a state that allows you to learn and retain any type of information, such as a vortex that absorbs what is motivated to learn, and also everything that surrounds it.”8
These are news teachers and parents can use. Hook with big children Questions and helping them discover what sucks their curiosity is a concrete way of supporting their general learning. The challenge is not to make them fall in love with all subjects But what happens if we encourage your curiosity with one or two? What happens if we pay close attention to what aroused his interest, what inspired his astonishment and pushed him?
Deborah Farmer Kris is the author of “Rair amazing: how the science of wonder can help our children prosper. “You can follow the substitute @Raiseingoweakers or in bluesky in @deborahfarmerkris.
