| layout | page |
|---|---|
| title | About |
| permalink | / |
Curiosity, or the desire to acquire information about the world, is a solution to adapt to the endless world we live in. Initial research suggests that learning could indeed be enhanced by curiosity, and that curiosity could, in its turn, be enhanced by a metacognitive awareness of one’s own learning progress. We call here metacognition the control, monitoring and evaluation of one’s own thought process.
Yet, the reciprocal influences between curiosity-based learning and metacognition remain poorly understood, even more so during late childhood and adolescence when both abilities continue to develop. To address this gap, our interdisciplinary approach explores the bidirectional connections between curiosity-based learning and metacognition during this crucial developmental period.
Additionally, late childhood and adolescence is marked by increasing needs of autonomously taking action in the world, called agency, which can boost the curiosity effects on learning thanks to the learner being in control of the learning material. We therefore seek to study how the protracted development of metacognition enhances the efficiency of curiosity-based learning, especially in situations of high agency.
Thanks to the diversity of skills and approaches of the collaborators of this DQUEST project, ambitious experiments are planned that cross methodological approaches and probe both across-person and within-person variations in the contribution of metacognition and agency to curiosity across late childhood and adolescence. The lab-based findings will assist in designing pedagogical interventions that stimulate curiosity and metacognition in the classroom.
The co-leaders of that project are Yana Fandakova from Trier University (Germany), Matthias Gruber from Cardiff University (UK), and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Hélène Sauzéon from INRIA Bordeaux (France). They are assisted by several [collaborators]({{ '/contact' | relative_url }}) introduced on the dedicate webpage.
On this website, you may read brief [presentations of the experiments]({{ '/projects' | relative_url }}) of the DQUEST project, either under development, ongoing or completed. If you are interested in what we do or simply want to talk, do not hesitate to contact us!