Doctoral student Kenji Kitamura awarded grant for study on curiosity and learning in Nepal's classrooms

Kenji Kitamura, a SEED Lab member and HGSE doctoral student, has been awarded the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative Interdisciplinary Mind Grant for his research project, “From Curiosity to Learning in Classrooms in Nepal.” In collaboration with Sarthak Shiksha, a local non-governmental organization in Nepal, and a team of local research assistants, Kenji is conducting mixed-methods research, including a lab-in-the-field randomized controlled trial in early-grade classrooms across 60 schools in Nepal. His work investigates the causal impacts of curiosity-related behaviors (i.e., information seeking) on learning outcomes, the roles of complementary skills (e.g., executive function), and broader questions about the contextual variation in the function of information-seeking, as well as teachers’ views and practices related to curiosity-promoting instruction.