Epistemic Curiosity, Conceptual Ambiguity and Cognitive Conflict: Do these Implicate Students Exploratory Behavior. Contemporary demands in the labour market continue to be more scientific technological. Onus is on institutions of higher learning to develop in students’ flexibility of thinking, as well as an inquiring and inquisitive mindset, that would stimulate in them the culture for curiosity and scientific research. Consequently, this paper establishes a link of cognitive/educational psychology research to epistemic curiosity and human exploratory behavior in postgraduate students attending educational psychology classes, to assess how epistemic curiosity implicates their inquiry and affects critical thinking for classroom practice.
The data in all the tests indicated above, are suggestive, that typically, when people have the mindset that they have access to knowledge, this realization induces a more heightened arousal,
relative to people with the belief that they have a much larger knowledge gaps. Central to the desire to bridge this gap is epistemic curiosity which is an essentially emotional-motivational
state.
These findings are consistent with the psychological behavior of humans when faced with interest on hand, and deprivation-type curiosity on the other. Additionally, these findings have implications for classroom teaching especially in the area of enhancing inquiry and critical attitude as well as self regulation in the students’ intellectual development.
As predicted in this study, the findings above, by and large corroborate the thesis of Loewenstein, namely, that when there is a cognitive dissonance or cognitive ambiguity or conflict concerning the probability that the feelings-of-knowing already stored in people’s LTM would come to the fore arousing a heightened stimulation towards resolving the conflict. Additionally, these findings have implications for classroom teaching especially in the area of enhancing inquiry and critical attitude as well as self regulation in the students’ intellectual development.
