Doctoral student Kenji Kitamura awarded grants to support research on children's curiosity in Nepal

Kenji Kitamura, a doctoral student at the HGSE and a member of the SEED lab, has been awarded the Weatherhead Center Pre-dissertation Grant and the Harvard Asian Center Graduate Research Grant for the summer of 2024, for his research project, "An Emic Exploration of Epistemic Curiosity in Early Childhood in Nepal."

In collaboration with Sarthak Shiksha, a local non-governmental organization in Nepal, Kenji will conduct a video-cued ethnographic study to improve understanding of how epistemic curiosity (EC) manifests in children’s behaviors and how these behaviors are perceived by teachers and parents. He aims to use the findings from this study to develop a new EC measurement tool with ecological validity in low- and middle-income countries. He plans to use the tool to investigate how EC, along with other important skills and dispositions, mediates the effects of different early educational experiences (e.g., child-centered, play-based practices vs. didactic practices) on children's learning trajectories in his future studies.