“My favorite words are possibilities, opportunities and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.” – Mario Testino

Curiosity is a word that speaks majorly of how a human’s mental growth is associated with this growing ability. It heavily relates to every general feature of an individual’s development. This then creates in them a desire to gain more knowledge and skill about varied topics in life. This quality is seen when students are constantly exploring, grasping new information while asking relatable questions and seeking new learning experience.

How Does it Benefit Students’?

Being a part of society today, requires immense knowledge of a wide various subjects that may or may not be related to a specific stream of study. But with higher curiosity levels, it is observed that students spend a major amount of time in acquiring knowledge through many resources. This is where students feel the need to push themselves into the abyss of information. By not initiating curiosity or refuting it, it may build a gap between what they seem to know and what they want to know. Research has also showed how much it influences the overall performance of the students and the level of hard work they put into it.

By doing so, the students start building up adaptive behavior which helps them tolerate as well as revert to complex emotions such as anxiety, humor playfulness, out-of-the-box thinking and plenty of other attributes that are directly proportional to ideal social outcomes. Additionally, in a world today where technology is used immensely, students tend to become actively involved in learning more. This is where their individual curiosity is proved and shows how they are ready to push through to find answers to their own question. This in turn also build the ability in them to take individual decisions. Students by constantly building up their curiosity are not only benefiting on the academic front, but in their future careers as well. Plenty of industry experts speak of how curiosity is the key element of a successful organizations. But, it’s also a necessity to ensure that the students do not get too carried away and use their curiosity in a regulated manner.

The Onset of Curiosity – Allowing Further Growth of Mind

Curiosity needs to be built using various factors, and not just topics that are unrelated. It needs to involve past experiences and a vast knowledge bank where a thought pattern is formed in the mind of the students. They can themselves observe how well self-direction is utilized as they seek to understand things.

Ways to Stimulate Curiosity Among Students

• Asking Questions – Initiating questions that begin with a ‘why’ can help in bringing the questions into students’ minds. The answers to such questions are also the ones that involve greater levels of engagement than just direct fact bases questions. This helps in inciting deeper interest towards the subject or topic among them.
• Reward Curiosity – The best way to do so, is to feed the concept into their minds and eventually reward them for their rising curiosity. A reward system is always efficient as students start relating their rise in curiosity to being given compliments for the same. This also gives them a push to go even further into the topics without any external influence.
• Make it Okay to ‘not know’ things – A lot of students hesitate in showing their lack of knowledge but making them do so will effectively get rid of this thought. The implementation of assessment-based learning may tend to create an illusion in the students’ mind that they do indeed know things. This is where things may start getting difficult for them when they may have doubts about newer subjects. Educators can work towards reassuring the students that not knowing something is alright if they are able to question it in the right way. Sessions at the end of class where they can ask any doubts no matter how basic they maybe are are helpful. It can help in getting them past the initial hesitation and gives them assurance that no doubt is silly.
• Use more relatable current events – news reports are always intriguing and also easily grab people’s attention. Using them to relate to the subject will easily help students ask purposeful questions. They in turn help in unearthing whatever is beneath the surface of the reports which leads into cultivating curiosity as a habit.
• Teach Students to be Skeptics – The term skeptic literally means to look around, enquire or explore. This challenges the students comfort zone and is in fact a great method to increase curiosity levels.

Looking at the world, it is clear that human kind has come this far using the one quality and that has created a wide range of changes. Being keen about learning new things will always be the key factor in new creations and inventions which will be beneficial to the people as well as the world.