Professional Curiosity Counts in Higher Education: Multi-dimensional Associations among Undergraduates’ Professional Curiosity, Self-Efficacy and Learning Outcomes

While curiosity has been widely acknowledged as a critical learning facilitator, its role and mechanism have been largely unexplored at the domain-specific (professional) level, especially in the case of humanities and social science majors. This study aimed to understand the associations between two-dimensional epistemic curiosity at the professional level and the multiple learning outcomes of undergraduates in these majors. It further explored the role of professional self-efficacy in these associations. With 828 Chinese undergraduate participants, results indicated the following at the professional level: (1) deprivation-type curiosity had positive associations with learning engagement and performance but contributed to greater learning burnout; (2) interest-type curiosity was beneficial to enhancing future career commitment and alleviating learning burnout; (3) self-efficacy predominantly transferred the benefits of deprivation-type curiosity in learning engagement and performance, whilst masking its detriments in exacerbating burnout and undermining future career commitment; and (4) self-efficacy also amplified the compensatory role of interest-type curiosity in burnout and buffered the contributions of interest- and deprivation-type curiosity to future career commitment. These findings imply the unique and equally important roles of both types of professional curiosity, and identify professional self-efficacy as a crucial factor in explaining their contributions.