Jamie Jirout

University of Virginia | UVa · Curry School of Education

Curiosity and creativity are theoretically linked, but very little empirical research has examined this relation. The current paper examines the association between curiosity and creativity in elementary school aged children (ages 4- to 10-years) using both self-report (N = 51) and behavioral (N =82) measures. Consistent with findings from an adult...

Learning environments can support the development of foundational knowledge and promote children's attitudes toward learning and school. This study explores the relation between school enjoyment and general knowledge from preschool (2016–2017) to kindergarten (2017–2018) in 1359 children (Mage = 55, 61 months, female = 50%; 58.5% Hispanic, 17% Blac...

Purpose Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e., harmony, reciprocity and responsiveness in interactions) is a component of parent-child interactions that is not well characterized in studies of play. Procedures...

Curiosity is widely acknowledged as a crucial aspect of children’s development and as an important part of the learning process, with prior research showing associations between curiosity and achievement. Despite this evidence, there is little research on the development of curiosity or on promoting curiosity in school settings, and measures of cur...

Uncertainty can play an important role in learning in educational settings. The realization that one does not know something can be perceived as an opportunity for learning, and the desire to seek this information is related to an important intellectual virtue: curiosity. Specifically, curiosity can be defined as desiring and persisting in informat...

The executive functioning skill set, which includes working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, begins developing in early life and continues into adulthood. Preschoolers’ abilities to perform those skills may be influenced by diet. The purpose of this study was to explore the acute effects of consuming a low-GI diet compared to...

Contemporary discussions around gender roles, stereotypes, and play highlight the need for updated research on the influences of children’s early play experiences and learning (Weisgram, 2018). Different types of play relate to different skills and vary by gender, such as spatial play and spatial skill (Jirout & Newcombe, 2015; Voyer et al., 1995),...

Question asking plays a fundamental role in learning, and the cognitive development literature contains many studies of specific types of question-asking skills. However, little is known about the developmental course across different aspects of question asking, of which we explore: (a) the ability to ask questions that enable children to solve a s...

Curiosity and curiosity-driven questioning are important for developing scientific thinking and more general interest and motivation to pursue scientific questions. Curiosity has been operationalized as preference for uncertainty (Jirout and Klahr, 2012), and engaging in inquiry-an essential part of scientific reasoning-generates high levels of unc...

In today’s research environment, children’s diet, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors are commonly studied in the context of health, independent of their effect on cognition and learning. Moreover, there is little overlap between the two literatures, although it is reasonable to expect that the lifestyle factors explored in the health-fo...

As research continues to show the benefits of high-quality early childhood education, it is important to ensure that measures are available to assess the full impacts of these programs for student outcomes. Many achievement measures and observational measures exist, but there is a need for measures of children’s experiences at the preschool level....

Curiosity is essential for scientific discovery and innovation [1, 2] and, more universally, is a natural and irrepressible characteristic of young children [3, 4, 5]. Yet it is also sometimes considered maladaptive in its influence later in development [6]. In the U. S. education system, which is now heavily focused on students meeting fixed stand...

Most topics beyond basic arithmetic require relative magnitude reasoning. This chapter describes the link between relative magnitude reasoning and spatial scaling, a specific type of spatial thinking. We discuss use of the number line, proportional reasoning, and fractions. Consideration of the relational reasoning involved in mathematics can advan...

Children's understanding of scientific concepts begins in infancy, but develops considerably with experience over many years. Focusing primarily on from the past 20 years, we discuss the development of scientific concepts in three sections: understanding of physical concepts, understanding of biological concepts, and scientific learning processes –...

This half-day IDC 2015 workshop focuses on children's curiosity and how novel digital technologies can help assess and promote it. Our goal is to explore the design, development, use and evaluation of new technologies for this purpose, in terms of: i) challenges in assessing children's curiosity; ii) different evaluation methodologies; iii) design...

There is evidence suggesting that children's play with spatial toys (e.g., puzzles and blocks) correlates with spatial development. Females play less with spatial toys than do males, which arguably accounts for males' spatial advantages; children with high socioeconomic status (SES) also show an advantage, though SES-related differences in spatial...

The developmental trajectory of learning to do science is long. Though some mechanisms of science learning like curiosity, asking questions, and exploration seem to develop spontaneously in children, all science process skills require support, scaffolding, and instruction to mature into the sophisticated process skills seen in scientifically litera...

Games provide important informal learning activities for young children, and spatial game play (e.g., puzzles and blocks) has been found to relate to the development of spatial skills. This study investigates 4- and 5-year-old children's use of scaled and unscaled maps when solving mazes, asking whether an important aspect of spatial learning—the a...

The goal of science education interventions is to nurture, enrich, and sustain children’s natural and spontaneous interest in scientific knowledge and procedures. We present taxonomy for classifying different types of research on scientific thinking from the perspective of cognitive development and associated attempts to teach science. We summarize...

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...

Research Findings: This article focuses on preschool science, an important but underresearched school readiness domain. There is considerable activity surrounding quality science in early childhood classroom practices, including state standards, curricula with science activities, and an extensive literature on potential best practices. However, the...