Establishing Criterion Groups for Evaluating Measures of Curiosity

CURIOSITY HAS long been considered an im portant attribute, if not always one to be encour aged (4). In recent years it has received in creasing attention because of its relationship to creativity. Most schools of psychology implicit ly or explicitly indicate an awareness of it (2, 7). Curiosity or exploratory behavior of lower animals has been rigorously investigated (3, 6), and some effort has also been made to study curiosity of human beings (1). Although a considerable body of literature has accumulated in which curiosity has been discussed, very few empirical studies have been directly concerned with children's curiosity. One reason for the dearth of investigations involving children may be the lack of instruments with which to measure curiosity. A major problem in developing measures of curiosity is establishing validity. One approach is to identify a group of children of high curiosity and another groupof low curiosity and to see whether proposed measures of curiosity discrim inate between the two groups. Isolating such cri terion groups was the purpose of the present in vestigation.