Abstract

• The main purpose of this study was to investigate high school students’ need for cognition (NFC) and curiosity in Wundwin Township. The descriptive research design and quantitative survey method were taken in the present study. The total of 1600 (male=775, female=825) Grade 10 and Grade 11 students were selected as participants from four high schools by using simple random sampling technique. As the instruments, Need for Cognition Scale developed by Cacioppo, Petty and Kao (1984) with 18 items and Curiosity and Exploratory Inventory I and II developed by Kashdan, T. B. et al., (2004, 2009) with 15 items were applied. The internal consistency reliability coefficient was 0.801 for NFC and 0.756 for curiosity. The results revealed that there were significant differences in comparison of Gender, Grade and Schools in NFC. The female students had higher NFC than the male students. And, Grade 10 students had better NFC than Grade 11 students. According to schools, the students from school 1 had the highest both in NFC and in curiosity. And, the findings also showed that there were significant differences by Grade, Subject Combination, Schools and NFC Groups in students’ curiosity. The results showed that Grade 10 students had better curiosity than Grade 11 students and also showed that Combination 7 students were more curious than Combination 1 students. When comparing between NFC groups, high NFC students were more curious than low NFC students. Then, the findings revealed that there was significant positive relationship between need for cognition and curiosity (r = .598, p < 0.01). According to Simple Linear Regression analyses, need for cognition was key predictor on curiosity. Adjusted R2 result showed that 35.8% of variance in curiosity which was explained by need for cognition.