The most important result from the last twenty years of classroom research has been the shift from “teacher-centered” to “student-centered” teaching. Yet, most of this research have defined and focused on HOW students learn. But, for teaching to be “student-centered” we must first
understand WHY students WANT to learn. By understanding student motivation we would be able to fully be able to integrate them into their learning process. Using the definition of curiosity ofered by cognitive scientists (Loewenstein’s Information Gap Theory of Curiosity), this
workshop will provide some basic strategies instructors can use to motivate students to learn by creating curiosity, rather than by ofering external rewards such as grade points. Further, we intend to demonstrate the validity of these strategies by connecting them to classroom experiments we conducted in a very large (1,700 students) Principles of Economics course.
