Rewarding curiosity
“What is the white stuff? Where did it come from?”
I was in the lab, working on a demonstration I would use as part of an upcoming award lecture. As he watched, my 7-year-old son peppered me with questions: “Maybe they’re bubbles. Oh, look — the white stuff is falling down! What happens if you shake it up?”
In the two-and-a-half years since, this once-curious kid has been asking fewer and fewer questions. Instead, he’s more concerned with telling me everything he knows. I’m a proud father, of course, but I miss his questions (or, rather, looking up answers to his questions). So what happened?
When I look back on my own time in grade school, I don’t ever remember being rewarded for asking a question — not in a letter grade and certainly not socially. My job was to absorb facts and practice skills. Questions advertised my shortcomings, the things I did not know and could not do. Questions interrupted the flow of class, irritating my classmates and teachers alike. Questions implicitly criticized the authority and competence of my teachers. Questions got me into trouble; answers got me praise. But shouldn’t my teachers and parents and friends also be celebrating my questions, my vulnerability, my willingness to learn?
While being taught chemistry and biology, I also was being taught to be ashamed of my ignorance and curiosity. Did Levi–Strauss have it wrong? If science is all about asking questions, where do the questions come from? If not from me, then whose questions will I answer? What if I’m not interested in those questions? Do I get a say in what questions I get to answer?
As instructors, we routinely solicit answers — on exams and quizzes, in discussion and in activities. Using answers as tools to identify concepts students still do not understand is problematic, as the answers are tightly constrained by the context of the question. Other techniques, like the muddiest point technique (in which students write down something from the lecture they still find confusing), are a start, but they tend to serve the instructor, soliciting hasty and superficial feedback from students rather than encouraging thoughtful development and refinement of a deep and meaningful line of inquiry.
So if asking questions is a fundamental and, indeed, indispensable element of scientific inquiry, why don’t we teach it? Why don’t we explicitly develop capacity for it in our students? Why don’t we incentivize it in our grading schemes?
A quick search through the literature returns several articles devoted to student-generated quiz questions or opportunities for student feedback but few devoted to contextualized, authentic inquiry. The dearth of such articles reflects my lived experience as both a student and a faculty member: Questioning skills rank far behind instructional design, classroom and laboratory activities, assessment of learning outcomes, and building an inclusive learning environment, to name just a few of the teaching establishment’s priorities. Moreover, this list of priorities is replete with top-down approaches for which the student is the object.
Imagine for a moment that students had more agency: What if students used questions to drive their own learning, to construct their own understanding of a topic?
Cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget recognized that we derive our knowledge from our experiences, the basis of constructivist pedagogies. Knowledge cannot be poured into a capped vessel. Our potential for growth is limited by our curiosity.
“But I have to teach my students the content,” , as if the only way their students could possibly learn would be from their instructors’ lips and/or writing.
Consider a class where you’ve just talked about the basics of enzymes. You’ve covered KM and vmax and showed velocity vs. substrate concentration plots. Sure, you could next lecture and set up activities covering Lineweaver–Burk plots and enzyme inhibition. But what if you instead showed your students a Lineweaver–Burk plot with and without inhibitor, told them it was a double-reciprocal plot, and asked them to interpret it?
After a minute or two of befuddlement (and possibly cursing your name), they might look at the axes and ask how the plot is related to the Michaelis–Menten equation. They might even infer the nature and utility of a double-reciprocal plot along the way. They might look for equations that describe a line. They might ask why the slopes of the lines or x- or y-intercepts differ. As they look into inhibitors, they might stumble across Lineweaver–Burk plots as tools for determining modes of inhibition. They might even then learn about the modes of inhibition themselves, leading them to allostery. All the while, they would be constructing their own knowledge by consulting textbooks, websites and one another. And as you listen to (or read) their conversations, you, the instructor, could learn about their misconceptions, graph literacy and problem-solving process, giving you insights into future lessons.
I have applied this inquiry-based approach to my own biochemistry courses. In doing so, I have borrowed from my mentor and former instructor . (And from another scholar: Soc