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.

好奇心——理解的内在动机——是学习不可或缺的一部分。然而，关于如何以及何时激发学生好奇心的经验证据明显缺乏，尤其是对于枯燥的学习材料。本研究以信息差距理论为基础，考察了顺序提供答案提示是否会增加学生对有趣和无聊的琐事问题的好奇心。对 212 名本科生进行了两项实验研究。提示的数量在中间（研究 1；提示与无提示）和个体内部（研究 2；每个问题 0 ~ 4 个提示）级别进行操作。两项实验的结果都表明，当内容无聊时，提示只会激起好奇心。提供提示还可以提高学生的知道答案的感觉、表现（猜测的准确性）、任务后的兴趣以及重新参与任务的意愿。遇到预测错误（即低置信度的正确猜测或高置信度的错误）会引发学生对解释的好奇心。这些发现促进了好奇心文献的不断增长，并帮助教育工作者使平凡的学习内容变得好奇。