The study was conducted by Akhtim Wahyuni and Mukhoiyaroh of the Department of Early Childhood Islamic Education at Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Ampel Surabaya. Rather than measuring question-asking in children directly, the researchers turned their attention to the adults who spend every day with them: teachers and teaching assistants. Their goal was to understand how early childhood educators perceive the relationship between children’s self-concept, their sense of psychological safety in the classroom, and their willingness to ask questions.

To capture those perceptions, the team employed a qualitative multisite case study design, a methodological approach that allows researchers to examine a phenomenon in depth across multiple real-world settings. The study involved 26 teachers and teaching assistants drawn from five early childhood education institutions in rural East Java, Indonesia. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, a technique that combines a consistent set of guiding questions with the flexibility to probe unexpected themes as they emerge in conversation. The interview transcripts were then analyzed using thematic analysis, the widely used qualitative procedure for identifying, coding, and interpreting patterns of meaning across a dataset, following the framework established by Braun and Clarke in 2006.

The findings paint a picture in which children’s question-asking is not an isolated behavior but the visible tip of a deeper psychological structure. Participants in the study interpreted self-concept, a child’s internal understanding of who they are and what they are capable of, as an important psychological condition associated with the willingness to participate in classroom life. Children who saw themselves as capable learners, teachers suggested, were more inclined to step forward, speak, and ask. This perception aligns with a long tradition in educational psychology, notably the work of Herbert Marsh and Andrew Martin, who have documented reciprocal relationships between academic self-concept and achievement: children who believe they can succeed tend to engage more, and that engagement in turn reinforces their self-belief.

Yet self-concept alone did not explain why some children ask questions and others remain silent. The teachers interviewed for the study consistently described psychological safety, the shared belief that one can express oneself without fear of embarrassment, ridicule, or punishment, as a relational condition underpinning children’s expression of curiosity. The concept, originally formulated by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson in her 1999 research on learning behavior in work teams, has since migrated into educational settings, where it describes classrooms in which the social cost of making mistakes is low. In such environments, asking a question is experienced not as an admission of ignorance but as a legitimate contribution to shared learning.

According to the teachers’ perspectives captured in the study, this safety is constructed through responsive practices: the moment-to-moment quality of teacher–child interactions. When educators respond to children’s utterances with attention, validation, and genuine engagement, they signal that children’s voices matter. When responses are dismissive or harsh, the implicit message is that silence is safer. This echoes research on teacher–child interactions by J aspire Downer, Terri Sabol, and Bridget Hamre, who have theorized that the emotional and instructional quality of these interactions shapes developmental outcomes across multiple domains, including language and social competence.

The authors are careful to frame their contribution as interpretive rather than causal. The study does not claim that self-concept causes question-asking, or that psychological safety mechanically produces curiosity. Instead, it offers an understanding of how educators perceive the interplay between children’s self-concept, classroom relationships, and participation. This is a deliberate epistemological choice. Qualitative case studies, as methodologists Robert Stake and Robert Yin have argued, are suited to illuminating the meanings and contexts that surround human behavior rather than isolating statistical effects. In this case, the meanings held by teachers in rural Indonesian classrooms become the data through which the phenomenon of children’s questions can be understood.

The setting of the study is itself significant. Much of the research on early childhood curiosity, self-concept, and classroom participation has been conducted in Western, urban contexts, raising persistent questions about how findings transfer to other cultural and economic settings. Rural East Java presents a distinctive educational landscape, where resources may be constrained and early childhood institutions often serve close-knit communities with particular cultural norms around respect, hierarchy, and children’s expression. By listening to teachers in these settings, the study broadens the empirical base of a field in which the voices of non-Western educators have historically been underrepresented.

The theoretical stakes of the research reach back decades. Children’s questions have long fascinated developmental psychologists. In a landmark monograph, Michelle Chouinard, Paul Harris, and Michael Maratsos catalogued the sheer scale of children’s question-asking and argued that questions function as a mechanism for cognitive development, allowing children to gather knowledge precisely where their understanding runs out. Susan Engel’s work at Harvard has shown, more soberingly, that curiosity expressed through questions tends to decline as children progress through schooling, suggesting that classroom environments may dampen a drive that children bring with them. Research by Jirout and Klahr has further clarified that children’s questions come in many forms, some seeking facts and others seeking explanations, and that the adults around them play a decisive role in determining which questions get asked at all.

Against this backdrop, the new study contributes a specific and practically important insight: the pathway from curiosity to question may run through a child’s sense of self and safety. In the framework suggested by self-determination theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, children’s motivation thrives when their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met. A teacher’s responsive practice addresses all three at once, affirming competence, honoring autonomy, and building relationship. The Indonesian teachers’ accounts, as interpreted by the researchers, fit this pattern closely, suggesting that the fostering of children’s voices is less a matter of instructional technique than of relational climate.

The findings also connect to children’s rights. Laura Lundy’s influential 2007 framework, developed from Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, argued that ‘voice’ is not enough: children must have space to express views, an audience that listens, and influence over what happens next. Dana Mitra’s research on student voice in schools similarly suggests that participation contributes to youth development in ways that extend beyond academics. The new study brings these ideas into the preschool years, where agency begins. If psychological safety and responsive interaction are the preconditions of young children’s voice, then the earliest classrooms may be where children’s right to be heard is either established or foreclosed.

For practitioners, the implications are tangible. The study underscores the importance of fostering psychological safety and responsive teacher–child interactions to support young children’s voice and agency in learning. In practical terms, this means that how a teacher responds to a halting, half-formed question may matter as much as any curriculum. Teachers who treat every question as welcome, who model comfort with uncertainty, and who convey through their daily practices that the classroom is a place where children’s ideas are safe, appear, in the educators’ own accounts, to cultivate children who ask.

The researchers acknowledge the interpretive limits of their design. With 26 participants across five sites, the study cannot establish causal relationships, and its findings reflect teacher perceptions rather than observed child behavior. Future work, the findings suggest, might pair these perspectives with direct observation of question-asking in classrooms, or extend the multisite approach to other regions and cultural contexts. There is also room to examine how specific responsive practices, particular forms of feedback, questioning routines, or emotional support, translate into measurable changes in children’s willingness to ask.

Still, the study arrives at a moment of renewed scientific interest in curiosity as a driver of learning, from research on explanation-seeking curiosity in childhood by Liquin and Lombrozo to ongoing debates about how schools can protect children’s innate drive to know. Its central message is quietly radical in its simplicity: children’s questions are not merely a sign of intelligence or personality, but a barometer of relationships. A classroom in which children ask freely is a classroom in which children feel seen, safe, and capable. And the responsibility for building that classroom rests, in large measure, with the adults in the room.