Why We Should Be Thinking About Children’s Thinking

This blog post was guest-written by Elizabeth Bonawitz, Ph.D., who is the David J. Vitale Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

“I don’t need to take an intro to coding course, Mom—that’s all going to be handled by ChatGPT by the time I’m out of school.” I’m poring over the freshman high school course catalog with my son, as we figure out his classes for next year. He’s partly right—we don’t know what types of jobs will be available in the 10 years that will pass before he’s out of college. But it’s not the class’s material I care about—it’s the exercises that will develop his thinking.

In a future where we don’t know what kinds of jobs and skills will be needed, our children will need to be flexible. Our future workforce must recognize when they aren’t sure how something works, be eager to figure things out, and take action to gather new information. They need to be motivated and have the skills to figure things out on their own. These skills are what scientists call learning to learn, which involves recognizing that there are things you don’t know, and having the motivation, and most importantly, the curiosity to figure them out.

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Curiosity has long felt like a magic bullet in education. It is a great leveler of educational outcomes. For example, for children with lower family income, curiosity predicts reading and math success in kindergarten. That is, although children from richer households tend to do better on tests, curiosity relates to higher scores for children from less well-supported backgrounds.

Curiosity can describe a response to a particular event (“state”) or one’s longer-term disposition (“trait”). Many have the intuition that “trait” curiosity is fixed—a curious person will always be a curious person—but research in developmental psychology has revealed ways that we can foster curiosity. For example, for children from lower-income households, supportive parenting and safer neighborhoods are positively associated with trait curiosity. This suggests that environmental and home experiences influence general curiosity.

Research on Curiosity and Children's Learning

In my research group, we seek to understand curiosity and explain how children learn to learn, so we know what kinds of approaches support these skills. We have looked at whether relatively small nudges in how we talk to children can boost their curiosity. For example, in a collaboration with Professor Allyson Mackey at Penn, we found that encouraging children to ask questions about science content can boost their valuation of new scientific information. These results suggest that practicing routines like question-asking can foster curiosity more generally.

Importantly, boosting children’s curiosity can also boost children’s learning to learn. For example, in another study in my lab, colleagues and I looked at ways parents interact with their children that might predict later independent learning. We gave parents the goal of helping their child discover how a toy worked. Then we gave the children a new problem to solve through playful exploration on their own. We found that some children’s parents were more likely to ask guiding, curiosity-inducing questions to their children during this shared playtime. Most importantly, it was those children—the ones whose parents asked more guided questions in the joint-play phase—that were better able to subsequently solve the new problem on their own. These results suggest that fostering curiosity through question-asking helps children learn how to learn.

Current Approach to Teaching

Unfortunately, the current way we approach teaching in schools might be suppressing children’s curiosity. Shutting down questions, limiting interest-based choices, and reducing time for free exploration and play are likely to be three nails in the coffin of curiosity. With budget cuts and state regulations, too often our schools have been cornered into drill-and-kill practices that might lead to short-term gains of improved scores on tests designed to measure fact recall. But these approaches likely quash curiosity and hamper broader, long-term thinking skills.

At the same time, as artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools are leveraged more often, many students are offloading the work of thinking. When tools like ChatGPT are used to generate “ideas” and “arguments,” students miss the chance to learn by thinking. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Supporting Our Kids' Curiosity

As parents, we can pay attention to our kids’ thinking. We can support their curiosity and, thus, their learning to learn. We can ask them guiding questions during supported play. We can encourage them to ask their own questions. And we can monitor our children’s use of tools like ChatGPT to ensure our kids are not offloading their own thinking onto a machine.

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At the same time, AI writing tools may be a place where children can feel safe asking questions, without fear of appearing “dumb.” Ideally, children would be raised in an environment where question-asking is seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Until that day comes, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT may be a socially safe place for learners to double-check meanings for basic concepts, while still leaving the work of thinking and learning to the student.

At a broad level, we need to better connect school practice with the research on how the mind works, including investing in research on children’s learning. But while we might not be able to transform schools overnight—to focus less on testing content and more on nurturing curiosity—we can talk to our kids’ teachers. We can ask our teachers to model curiosity themselves. We can encourage them to reward students’ questions. To support independent thinking, we can ask teachers to discourage AI tools for writing. And we can recognize teachers who show interest in our students’ interests.

I won’t force my son to take a coding course—after all, I want to nurture his interests. But I will ask him questions and continue to encourage him to ask his own. I’m not sure what my son’s future will hold, but I’m reassured by his passion for learning. And I hope his teachers will find a way to support that curiosity as well.