Wonder arrives unexpectedly. It is a feeling like no other, making us want to engage with a puzzling phenomenon we have encountered. It’s an emotive, reflective and meaning-making experience. 

Put simply, wonder is a feeling of puzzlement about something that seems important and interesting.

It’s not an easy concept to define. And yet research has shown that wonder is invaluable for learning: it increases students’ intrinsic motivation to actively pursue explanations, ask questions and reflect on new information; it widens their horizons and general interests; and it deepens their emotional engagement with the pursuit of knowledge. 

In school, wonder can help students to commit learning to memory, while supporting understanding and critical thinking.

For a 2011 meta-analysis, Sophie von Strumm and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh looked at over 200 studies, with a total sample size of over 50,000 children. They found that a sense of intellectual curiosity - what they call a “hungry mind” - is just as important in determining academic achievement as intelligence and effort.

We know that wonder has the potential to have a positive effect on learning. But owing to its elusive nature, we know little about how this plays out, or how much wonder is actually happening in school settings. The first step, then, is to capture its place in the classroom right now. 

At Lancaster University’s Active Learning Lab, led by Dr Marina Bazhydai, we are working to introduce an assessment tool with the power to do this.

We have already worked with over 400 primary school children in the UK, who have completed a 30-minute survey, called a ”wonder chart”, which asks them to respond to statements based around short stories or videos.

Based on their responses to the prompts, we then calculate a “wonder index”, which can be used as a quantitative measure of how much wonder the child is prone to experiencing. So far, we’ve found that children aged between 9 and 11 are particularly sensitive to experiencing wonder. 

We now want to find out more about the teacher’s role in generating wonder in the classroom. To do this, we are utilising a theoretical framework produced by a group of researchers at Vrije University in Amsterdam, which identifies eight educational strategies teachers should deploy to create “wonderful” education in the classroom:

1. Be sensitive to children’s personal wonder experiences and guide them further
2. Be a role model by sharing their own wonder experience
3. Create conditions for exploration, experimentation, questioning and reflection
4. Facilitate meaning-making with the lesson content
5. Stimulate imagination and creativity based on lesson content
6. Defamiliarise the familiar by emphasising the wonderful in everyday life
7. Encourage contemplation and attentive awareness
8. Design enriched environments through nature, art and technology

We then use a questionnaire, which asks teachers about their own practice in relation to each of the eight strategies: for example, “I recognise signs of wonder in my students”. An overall score will be calculated, which will then allow us to see to what extent wonder is present in teaching.

We want teachers to feel empowered to implement the wonder-full education approach in their classrooms, but first, they need to reflect on how often they are doing this already, and what this looks like in practice.

Dr Daphne Barker is a research associate in language and literacy at the University of Lancaster

If you are a key stage 2 teacher or teaching assistant in the UK schooling system, you can be involved in their research by completing a 10-15-minute online survey. Results will be anonymous and stored responsibly, in line with ethical guidelines. Please email activelearninglab@lancaster.ac.uk with any queries.