Young children practice cognitive accommodation all the time. Think of a small child whose only experience with dogs is little Shi -T of the family. One day the child meets the great Danish of the neighbor. Aunt! The child’s mental concept for a “dog” is rapidly expanding to include more shapes and sizes.
Cognitive accommodation is at the heart of good education: this is what allows students to upgrade previous knowledge to review, expand and deepen their understanding of concept. As Alan’s summer writes in the Science of Awe “White Paper:” AWE’s ability to extract cognitive accommodation can also explain why people are developing to experience this unique emotion. The experience of awe can be adaptive because we encourage us to accelerate the world.
The alertness of awe
“One of my favorite discoveries suggests that awe can help curiosity for the world,” I told me psychologist Craig Anderson. Anderson was part of a team that taught How this emotion influenced teenagers. “The more awe they experienced, the more curiosity they expressed and the better they performed at school,” he said.
Awe is sometimes described as “emotion of knowledge.” Paul Sylvia, Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, describes the emotions of knowledge as “a family of emotional states that encourage learning, research and reflection.” These emotions include surprise, interest, confusion and awe and come from experiences that are “unexpected, complex and mentally challenging, and they motivate learning in its broadest sense.”
According to Sylvia, Awe is a powerful educational instrument because it motivates people to explore things that stretch their understanding of the world. He wrote: “When people see beautiful and striking color images of supernova, black holes and planetary nebula, they usually report feelings of awe and wonder. Then these feelings motivate them to learn about what they see and their scientific meaning.”
When you are wondering, you are learning
None of this study would surprise Fred Rogers, for whom Wond was pedagogy. He knew that curiosity was what attracts children’s brains to learn. He also had this incredible capacity to communicate his own miracle over the screen – especially his charm with his young viewers.
I reached for Greg Ber and Ryan Raydidevski, co -authors of When you are wondering, you learn: Mr. Rogers’ lasting lessons for raising creative, curious, caring childrenLet’s hear more about what they learned from the study of Rogers’ work. They told me:
When Fred Rogers sang the words, When you are wondering, you are learningHe wasn’t kidding. In a very real sense, he was right. From modern science, we know that when we are in a miracle state, something is involved in the brain. We are beginning to absorb all kinds of information. And the more curiosity we feel, the greater the likelihood of keeping this information. S S Therefore, some scientists believe that curiosity can be as important as intelligence when it comes to the success of children in school.
According to researchers, curiosity has “a major impact on training and memory.” When the children are curious, they are more motivated to learn and more gone to keep information. Consider a four-year-old who knows the name of any dinosaur, a ten-year-old who can recite and explain G-Sili on dozens of trains or fourteen years that remembered everyone Hamilton lyrics. No teacher has appointed this job. The four -year -old went to the Museum of Natural History and was hypnotized by the huge skeletons. The ten -year -old rode her first train and became fascinated by the feeling and physics of all this. The fourteen -year -old has never heard a musical or a story like this, so they continue to listen. Great, curiosity, learning, memory.
Here’s another fantastic find: curiosity has a reinforcing effect on other Learning. A study from the University of California, Davis, found that when the participants were curious about the original information presented to them, they could easily absorb unrelated information. Just being in a curious state of mind helped the brain of participants to remember material that are less excited. As the lead author said, Matthias Gruber said: “Curiosity can put the brain in a state that allows him to learn and retain any kind of information, such as a whirlwind that is nasty in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around him.”8
These are news that teachers and parents can use. Engaging with big children Questions and help them find out what causes their curiosity is a specific way to support their training as a whole. The challenge is not to make them fall in love All subjects. But what if we nourish their curiosity by one or two? What if we pay a lot of attention to what aroused their interest, what inspired their awe and promoted it?
Deborah’s farmer Chris is the author of “”Growing Fearless: How Miracle Science can help our children thriveS “You can follow it @Raisingaweeakers or on Bluesky at @deborahfarmerkrisS
