What happens when we permit students to ask?

Imagine a classroom full of students, and you are learning something for the first time. A question suddenly pops into your mind. The lecture is over, and nobody says a word. Now your mind is filled with even more questions. Hesitation can happen for many reasons. Lack of confidence, uncertainty, fear of judgement, or simply not knowing whether it is okay to ask can all make a student hold back. Even when teachers encourage students to ask questions, something within us can still stop us.

But what happens when we deliberately create space for students to ask?

Elizabeth Bonawitz, an associate professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, studies curiosity, learning, and how children explore new information. Her research team conducted an experiment to understand what happens when children practise asking questions.

The study involved 103 children aged 5–7 years, who were divided into two groups:

1. Question-asking group

Children were encouraged to ask questions during their science lessons.

2. Listening group

Children were encouraged to listen carefully and pay attention.

Over two weeks, the children participated in eight one-on-one science lessons based on age-appropriate science curriculum content. In the question-asking group, researchers encouraged children to ask questions, modelled question-asking, and gave them positive feedback. The listening group, meanwhile, practised attentive listening. In simple terms, the researchers were comparing practising question-asking with practising attentive listening.

After the lessons, the researchers looked at several things, including what the children had learned and how they responded to new information. One of the most interesting parts of the experiment involved a simple choice.

The children could either receive new science information or receive stickers instead. The question was essentially: Would you give up a reward to learn something new?

The researchers used this as a behavioural measure of how much children valued new science information: one aspect of curiosity. And the result was interesting.

Children who had practised asking questions were more willing to give up stickers to access new science information than children in the listening group. In this particular task, the question-asking group showed a greater willingness to obtain new information. But here is where the research gets more interesting.

It would be easy to conclude that asking questions simply makes children learn more. The researchers, however, did not find a statistically significant overall difference in science-learning scores between the two groups

So the study does not give us a simple formula of:

Ask more questions → learn more. Instead, it gives us something more nuanced.

The researchers found that children's starting abilities mattered. Some of the effects of question-asking were stronger among children who began with lower levels of background knowledge. The researchers also found that children in the question-asking group increased the number of relevant questions they asked during the intervention. Perhaps the most interesting part is that the children weren't simply told to “be curious.”

They were allowed to practise curiosity by asking questions. And perhaps that is where the classroom lesson lies.

Curiosity does not always have to begin with a big activity or a complicated teaching strategy. Sometimes, it can begin with something much simpler: permitting students to wonder.