Curious Learners Research Articles

Incorporating an international perspective in leadership training.

Incorporating an international perspective in the experience and skill-based focus of leadership learning is central to preparing for leadership in the 21st century; a time when the world is increasingly connected across culture, governance, economies, and educational systems. For leadership educators to be more effective, the authors advocate heeding the voices of international students and colleagues, examining the legacy of colonialism, and engaging as humble and curious learners.

Pre-service teachers becoming researchers: the role of professional learning groups in creating a community of inquiry

Contemporary schools seek to employ teachers who are curious learners, who can employ practitioner inquiry skills to investigate, inform and grow their own classroom practice, responsive to their circumstances. As a profession, the question we must ask is how do we best prepare and continue to equip teachers with the necessary research skills to investigate and inform their own practice? In this study, we share our pedagogical stance and features of our approach in a new core undergraduate subject for pre-service teachers (PSTs). We discuss professional learning groups (PLGs) for initial teacher education students as the main intervention in the subject, and, more specifically, we elaborate how regular participation in PLGs formed in an on-campus subject can help PSTs to become researchers. We draw on 183 student exit tickets and student feedback surveys to consider broader implications for how to engage teachers in research. This study poses questions about the nature of practitioner research and investigates the role that PLGs play in disrupting the challenges universities face in preparing teachers to engage in and with research.

Journal Editorial: “UO Libraries Supports New U.S. Policy Making Research Results Available Immediately”

The letter below was written to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to its August 2022 memorandum establishing new federal policy on public access to the products of publicly funded research. At the University of Oregon, our students benefit from access to the widest possible range of newly published scholarly information through our Library’s subscriptions and e- resource collections. This access costs millions of dollars annually, much of it paid to the private, for- profit companies who collect and publish research. Many members of the public—including students at less well-funded institutions; high school students and K12 teachers; and curious learners unaffiliated with any university—lack the ability to read and learn from the latest scientific and medical information because the subscriptions are so unaffordable. This lack of access hinders scientific progress and is particularly unfair when considering that the public funds the underlying research activity through their tax dollars. The OSTP’s updated policy will ensure that when the government funds research—by providing grants to buy equipment, materials, hire researchers, run analyses, and more—that the findings from that research are immediately returned to the public for their benefit. We hope that this policy also means that the UO Library will be able to spend less every year on paying for these subscriptions, which will enable us to invest more directly in our students, faculty, and their important teaching and research work. We are proud to support the Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal as an open scholarly communications forum that undergraduates everywhere can read without cost. The UO and its Libraries will continue to advocate strongly for a fair and inclusive research communications system that everyone can afford to participate in.

Passionate about languages, but listening and speaking – ¡Ay, Caramba! Autistic adults discuss foreign language learning

ABSTRACT Little is known about how persons with autism spectrum conditions experience the process of learning foreign languages. To augment the research literature (reviewed here) with the experiences of autistic persons, online autism forums were scrutinised. Discussions pertinent to language learning were identified in English, Spanish, French and German, with 169 posts analysed. Thematic analysis revealed 8 themes. Three themes concerned ease and difficulty of learning. Reading and writing were strengths, due to their offline nature. Listening comprehension was difficult, especially with background noise. Speaking was difficult, due to demands of immediacy. Four inter-related themes could be understood as positive outcomes of autistic traits. Languages were a special interest, and many posters reported being self-taught. Posters often listed many languages but acknowledged that learning their full list was impractical. Posters reported being interested in diverse aspects of language structure, suggesting that languages were compelling because they provided an opportunity for systemising. Finally, posters discussed how autism conferred both advantages and disadvantages for language learning. Some posters discussed their engagement in terms reminiscent of polyglots and mild forms of linguistic savantism. This analysis revealed a group of curious learners whose abilities and strengths are mostly unknown to applied linguists.

Sea Prayer: An Illustrated Literary Narration on the Afflictions of Refugees

Children have been the most sought-after artist, sculptors, creators, innovators, poets, builders, and are likely to practice many professions and become one. As curious learners from their toddler life, they try to grab any object that is around and make some sense out of them. For instance, playing on a heap of sand they construct their dream homes, getting hold of their dad’s stethoscope they try to feel the ‘lub dub’ beat on the chest of their parents; playing with the cooking vessels that they stealthily take it from their mother’s kitchen and play the role of a cook and chef by heating water on a toy gas stove etc. These little incidents in their life, as little ones, have given a giant leap for mankind in the field of discovery and inventions.
 Many scientists like James Watt (watching the boiling kettle in his mother’s cottage), Archimedes (incident in his bathing tub), Isaac Newton (falling apple) and many other such scientists have invented something or the other, through observations and experiences. These inventions are taught to children in their science classes according to their syllabus that are graded by the education department and syllabus makers. This article will make an attempt to cater interest among students to get into the picturesque and fascinating world of children’s Nursery Rhymes to understand and learn many scientific and engineering concepts from it. Through the pictorial representations found in the nursery rhymes, many engineering concepts can be taught to children between the ages of six to fifteen. This can be seen as one of the innovative methods of revealing the great wonders of science through the Nursery Rhymes.

Using seminars as a teaching method in undergraduate nurse education

This article explores the use of seminars as a teaching method in undergraduate nurse education. Using the backdrop of a year 1 learning unit, grounded in the 6Cs, entitled person-centred practice, the format of the seminars is described in detail. It argues that engaging in a variety of student-centred activities helps students to become informed, self-motivated and curious learners. It identifies that using seminars as a teaching method helps to ensure that students understand and learn what they need to know by using a variety of learning approaches to support them in their personal and academic growth. These include discussion, groupwork, independent learning, the use of technology and building self-confidence, problem-solving approaches and reflection techniques. While being mindful of the higher order skills required to develop and manage seminars, the author uses the concept of constructive alignment to demonstrate development of the seminar approach from curriculum design, teaching, learning, assessment and evaluation.

Curious teachers, create curious learners and great historians

ABSTRACTEngel, S. [2011. “Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools.” Harvard Educational Review 81 (4): 625–645] stated that curiosity should be cultivated in our schools as it is intrinsic to children’s development. However, this is often absent from classrooms. In this paper we aim to explore some of the factors that have led to a lack of curiosity in today’s classrooms by identifying the impact of rapid policy and curriculum change. We will then justify the importance of creative teaching to develop curiosity, not only in children but also in their teachers – curious teachers develop curious learners. We will conclude by sharing some case studies to illustrate how curiosity can be developed using history lessons as a platform.

Curiosity-based learning in infants: a neurocomputational approach.

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated information selection that maximizes learning. We first present a neurocomputational model of infant visual category learning, capturing existing empirical data on the role of environmental complexity on learning. Next we “set the model free”, allowing it to select its own stimuli based on a formalization of curiosity and three alternative selection mechanisms. We demonstrate that maximal learning emerges when the model is able to maximize stimulus novelty relative to its internal states, depending on the interaction across learning between the structure of the environment and the plasticity in the learner itself. We discuss the implications of this new curiosity mechanism for both existing computational models of reinforcement learning and for our understanding of this fundamental mechanism in early development.