Curiosity and the Development of Question Generation Skills

The current study investigates the relationship between children’s curiosity and question asking ability. Generation of two types of questions was assessed: identification (yes/no questions asked to identify a target from an array) and understanding questions, asked to learn more about a topic. The latter was related to children’s curiosity, as was the ability to recognize the effectiveness of questions in solving a mystery. Training on asking identification questions was effective in improving children’s ability to ask that type of question, but did not transfer to the other task. Training on asking understanding questions was not successful. Children’s curiosity did not influence the effectiveness of the training.