A novel approach to the assessment of curiosity

The general consensus is that a curious mind is essential for learning, or at the very least facilitates learning. Assessment of curiosity, however, is challenging. We developed a practical, objective, behavioural measure for the assessment of epistemic curiosity for middle childhood, the Connect-the-Dots (CTD) task. The operationalization centres around the concept of an information gap: The experience of missing information may urge to search for information to close this gap and it is assumed that children differ in the strength of the urge to do so. The CTD task was administered to children (6-12 years; N = 328), and was administered again after about 11 weeks (N = 220). Internal consistency was good to excellent, test-retest reliability ranged from poor to sufficient. Correlations with teacher ratings of curiosity, and indicators of knowledge acquisition were positive and significant, indicating convergent validity. Directions for future studies with the CTD task are proposed.