Curiosity Is Critical to Academic Performance

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111027150211.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's good for the student. That's the conclusion of a new study published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors show that curiosity is a big part of academic performance. In fact, personality traits like curiosity seem to be as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school.

Intelligence is important to academic performance, but it's not the whole story. Everyone knows a brilliant kid who failed school, or someone with mediocre smarts who made up for it with hard work. So psychological scientists have started looking at factors other than intelligence that make some students do better than others.

One of those is conscientiousness -- basically, the inclination to go to class and do your homework. People who score high on this personality trait tend to do well in school. "It's not a huge surprise if you think of it, that hard work would be a predictor of academic performance," says Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. She co-wrote the new paper with Benedikt Hell of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of Goldsmiths University of London.

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When put together, conscientiousness and curiosity had as big an effect on performance as intelligence.

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Employers may also want to take note: a curious person who likes to read books, travel the world, and go to museums may also enjoy and engage in learning new tasks on the job. "It's easy to hire someone who has the done the job before and hence, knows how to work the role," von Stumm says. "But it's far more interesting to identify those people who have the greatest potential for development, i.e. the curious ones."

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