Abstract
Curiosity—intrinsic motivation to understand—is an integral part of learning. However, empirical evidence on how and when students’ curiosity is piqued is noticeably lacking, especially for boring learning materials. Grounded on the information gap theory, this study examined whether sequentially providing hints on the answer increased students’ curiosity for interesting and boring trivia questions. Two experimental studies were conducted with 212 undergraduates. The number of hints was manipulated in the between- (Study 1; hint vs. no-hint) and within-individual (Study 2; 0 ~ 4 hints per question) levels. The results of both experiments showed that hints only incited curiosity when the content was boring. Providing hints also improved students’ feeling-of-knowing the answer, performance (accuracy of guess), post-task interest, and willingness to reengage in the task. Encountering prediction errors (i.e., low-confidence correct guess or high-confidence error) triggered students’ curiosity about the explanation. These findings contribute to the growing body of curiosity literature and help educators make mundane learning content curious.