Curiosity and Its Cultivation in the Era of Generative AI
A Special Issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102) belonging to the section "Education and Psychology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 1697
Editors
Interests: educational assessment (in particular, assessment for learning); fostering learning cultures that promote student agency; cultivating curiosity and joy of learning in the GenAI era
2. School of Education, Sakhnin College, Sakhnin 3081000, Israel
Interests: educational assessment and methodology; teacher evaluation and higher education; curiosity and its cultivation
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Human curiosity is an uncontrollable drive for knowledge, deep understanding, and new experiences that stems from an insatiable internal motivation, but for most people, this drive fades over time when it is not challenged and not provided with a stimulating environment that nurtures the curiosity with which they were born.
Natural curiosity has led renowned individuals to groundbreaking inventions and achievements since the dawn of humanity. However, as GenAI penetrates our lives, access to knowledge is expanding rapidly, and the difficulty of obtaining it is decreasing.
The chatbot, the tireless personal assistant, can swiftly extract information from large databases to which it was exposed during its training and perform high-level integration and rapid linking across information from different fields. Hence, significant dilemmas arise regarding the future of human curiosity, the nature of knowledge, and the advantages of the human brain over large language models (LLMs). Will human curiosity continue to thrive as the time-consuming search for information, now most efficiently done by the bot, liberates time that could be used to enhance human creativity and invention, or will this time be wasted and the human brain degenerate with the lack of motivation for inquiry that was so essential to its flourishing and the advancement of humanity?
Therefore, more than ever, there is a need to design environments that foster curiosity and the soft skills associated with it (e.g., personal resilience, courage, handling uncertainty, self-initiated agency) among people of different ages. The current SI deals with these issues.
We will welcome empirical and theoretical papers, which address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Perceptions of curiosity and related soft skills in GAI-rich environments.
- Cultivation of curiosity across different age groups in the GAI era.
- Cultural, ethical, and equity aspects of cultivating curiosity in the era of GAI.
- Methodological aspects in the study of curiosity and human GAI interactions.
- The use of GAI tools in instruction, learning, and assessment for cultivating curiosity.
Submission Deadline:
- A 200–300-word abstract (Due date: 20 February 2026)
- Full version (for peer review) (Due date: 30 May 2026)
- Final version (Due date: 31 August 2026).
Prof. Dr. Menucha Birenbaum
Prof. Dr. Fadia Nasser
Dr. Hany Shilton
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- curiosity profiles
- perceived quality of life
- well-being
- curiosity cultivation
- GenAI era
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