| dc.description.abstract | Curiosity is a natural way to gather more information about the world, making it directly relevant for learning. However, little research has examined the relation between children’s curiosity and formal learning. Moreover, even less work has considered this possible association in light of the environmental factors that comprise children’s earliest opportunities for investigating and learning. Understanding the nature of this association is important because a better understanding of how to increase curiosity levels in children, if related to children’s early academic outcomes, could lead to an efficient and economical way to increase school readiness. Recognizing the likely importance of curiosity for child outcomes, one goal of this study was to determine whether parents’ curiosity-fostering behaviors moderate the connection between curiosity and school-readiness in children. This study examined how parents encourage their children to have more curiosity, as well as how parents respond when their children ask curious questions during normative, everyday interactions. We tested whether greater curiosity in children is related to greater school readiness and whether this association is dependent on parents’ behaviors. Moreover, we tested whether this association is greater for children in low-SES families. The final sample for this work consisted of 61 children who provided data as part of a longitudinal study between 3 and 5 years of age. When children were 3 years old, family SES was self-reported by parents, and children’s curiosity and parents’ behaviors were observed during a laboratory episode where children were allowed to investigate a set of novel toys. Behavioral curiosity was defined as exploratory behavior and the number of objects children manipulated; vocal curiosity was defined as the number of questions they asked that demonstrated curiosity. When children were 5 years old, school readiness was assessed via parent report. Results showed that increased behavioral curiosity predicted decreased school readiness (β = -0.37, SE = 0.14, p = 0.009) when accounting for SES. This suggests that, when levels of SES are controlled, greater exploratory behavior and manipulation of novel objects may be just as likely to indicate an absence of knowledge or experience as the presence of curiosity. Consistent with previous work, high levels of SES predicted greater school readiness (β = 0.42, SE = 0.14, p = 0.002) when behavioral curiosity was accounted for. Vocal curiosity did not predict school readiness, and neither parent behavior moderated the association between curiosity and school readiness. Thus, this study demonstrated how strong of a predictor SES is for school readiness and that the lack of knowledge or experience may have an important role in predicting school readiness. | en |
