Is Intellectual Curiosity a Strong Predictor for Academic
Performance?
the hungry mind.? Like cognitive ability and effort, intellectual curiosity positively associates (at medium effect sizes) with academic performance.
Several instruments have been developed to measure
something like curiosity. The ?Need for Cognition? scale measures the ?tendency
for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking? (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982,
p. 116). The ?Typical Intellectual Engagement? (TIE) scale was designed to
?differentiate among individuals in their typical expression of a desire to
engage and understand their world, their interest in a wide variety of things,
and their preference for a complete understanding of a complex topic or
problem, a need to know?.? (Goff and Ackerman, 1992, p. 539). Because these
measures have similar conceptual underpinnings and share criteria validity for
academic performance and intelligence, they appear to measure the same trait
dimension, and studies that use these scales can be rolled into a meta-analysis.
Study & Methods
To investigate whether curiosity is a strong determinant
for academic performance, Von Stumm, Hell, & Chamorro-Premuzic extracted
correlation coefficients from three previous studies and performed four
meta-analyses that focused on TIE to stand in for curiosity. For the new TIE
meta-analyses, the researchers selected 11 studies (including several in which
one of the authors had participated). They excluded studies that did not
include empirical data, did not include zero-order correlations, or included
previously reported data. In these studies, academic performance was expressed
as either grade point average or an academic performance composite. From the
extracted correlation coefficients and the new meta-analyses, the authors
created five path models using a stepwise process, settling on a single,
best-fit model.
Findings
The best fitting model indicated that intelligence, TIE,
and conscientiousness were direct and intercorrelated predictors of academic
performance. Within this model, intelligence (.35) accounted for the greatest
amount of variance while curiosity (.20) and effort (.20) had slightly smaller
and equal and independent impacts on academic performance. (The preceding
measurements are standardized beta weights.) The authors thus confirm their
hypothesis that intellectual investment, including curiosity, is a key
determinant of academic performance.
Discussion and Implications
The authors suggest several important ramifications of
this finding:
? Academic performance can be increased if students?
intellectual curiosity is regularly renewed and stimulated. Thus, students
should be
encouraged to follow challenging paths and not be
exclusively rewarded for their ?acquiescent application of intelligence and
effort.? Universities
and colleges should seek to exploit opportunities to
inspire curiosity and reward productive novelty.
? Admissions officers should pay attention to
intellectual curiosity as a strong predictor of potential.
? Future studies to examine predictors of academic
success should seek to expand their range beyond intelligence and effort.
Implications
Technology may have a role in cultivating curiosity by
providing greater access to new information, new ways to participate in culture
through new media (Jensen et al, 2006), and novel methods of visualizing data.
Curiosity might also have a role to play in orienting students toward life-long
learning, which has already been shown to be influenced by such pedagogical
practices as active learning, reflection, and tasks that encourage
perspective-taking (Mayhew, M.J., Wolniak, G.C., & Pascarella, 2008).
Study Limitations
As the authors note, the study is constrained by several
factors, including the quality of the original studies in the meta-analyses.
Further, only conscientiousness was used as a proxy for effort, ignoring
academic motivation, self-efficacy, and ambition. The study also did not
consider the cumulative effect of success as an ongoing magnifier for
conscientiousness and curiosity. To correct for this, another study would have
to consider the longitudinal effects of an academic course of study and not a
single moment. Finally, the authors concede that despite the encouraging
results that showed that conscientiousness and intellectual curiosity combined
influenced academic performance to the same degree as intelligence, other
variables likely to have an effect, such as choice of subject, socio-economic
status, self-confidence, etc., were not factored into a final model. Seen in
the context of these limitations, the study directs researchers to continue to
explore the nexus of no
n-ability
personality traits with intelligence to predict academic performance.
References
Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for
cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 116-131.
Goff, M., & Ackerman, P. (1992).
Personality-intelligence relations: Assessment of typical intellectual
engagement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 537-552.
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J.,
& Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture:
Media education of the 21st century. Chicago, IL: The MacArthur Foundation.
Mayhew, M.J., Wolniak, G.C., & Pascarella, E.T.
(2008). How educational practices affect the development of life-long learning
orientations in traditionally-aged undergraduate students. Research in Higher
Education. 49(4), 337-356.
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