Curiosity and Pleasures of Learning! Using Curiosity and Information Gaps to Motivate Students to Learn

This session aims to provide instructors with strategies to leverage one of these internal drives for learning: curiosity. I use the definition of curiosity offered by cognitive scientists, particularly Loewenstein’s Information Gap Theory of Curiosity, to offer several principles to leverage student’s motivation through curiosity. I intend to demonstrate the validity of these strategies by connecting them to clinical classroom experiments conducted in a very large (1,700 students) Principles of Economics course.