Educational Leadership - September 2015

DOUBLETAKE

To help teachers ask questions that
encourage student reflection and higher-
order thinking, Teach Thought has created
a list of question stems appropriate
for each of the six levels of Bloom’s
taxonomy. The questions stems can be
used for any content area or discipline. For
instance, to encourage thinking at Bloom’s
comprehension level, teachers might ask,
“Can you retell ___ in your own words?” For
the higher synthesis level, suggested stems
include “What would you infer from ____”
and “What might happen if you combined
___ with ___?” A chart listing all the stems—
as well as verbs to use in crafting questions
at each level of the taxonomy (define,
interpret, revise, and so on) is available
at www.teachthought.com/learning/25-
question-stems-framed-around-blooms-
taxonomy.

Research Alert
Online Only
The Power of Curiosity

A recent study in the journal Neuron indi-
cates that when a person’s curiosity about
a topic is piqued, it becomes easier for that
person to remember information presented
on the topic—and even to learn information
that’s not related to the topic. The study’s
lead author, Matthias Gruber, noted that its
findings “have far-reaching implications for the
public because they reveal insights into how a
form of intrinsic motivation—curiosity—affects
memory.”
Participants rated how curious they were
to learn the answers to a series of trivia ques-
tions. They were then presented with each
trivia question followed by its answer after a
14-second delay; during this delay, partici-
pants saw a photo of a neutral, unrelated face.
Next, experimenters gave participants a sur-
prise memory test for the faces, followed by a
memory test on the trivia items.

As anticipated, when a person was curious
to find out the answer to a trivia question, he
or she performed better at remembering that
information. The more surprising finding was
that participants who were curious about the
trivia questions also did better on the memory
test for faces. Gruber hypothesized that curi-
osity “put[s] the brain in a state that allows it to
learn and retain any kind of information, like a
vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to
learn, and also everything around it.”
The investigators believe their findings have
implications for education. If teachers can
somehow get students curious about material
they would otherwise consider boring (perhaps
by connecting it to something kids are fasci-
nated by), they might enhance students’ ability
to learn that material—and any material pre-
sented with it.

The study, “States of Curiosity Modulate Hip-pocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopa-minergic Circuit” by Matthias Gruber, Bernard Gelman, and Charan Ranganath, appeared in the October 2014 issue of Neuron.