Intellectual need is a specific form of intrinsic motivation; it is a desire to learn something. Although it is a difficult concept to grasp, it has been recognized as critical in effective education

Education

Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

 and learning

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

. Intellectual need arises when someone poses a question to themselves or others, either out of curiosity

Curiosity

Curiosity is an emotion related to natural inquisitive behavior such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species. The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity...

 or to solve a specific problem.

Intellectual need is often greatest when there is a hole in an otherwise well-connected web of knowledge. Merely understanding a question and being unable to answer it is not sufficient to create intellectual need—intellectual need arises when a person believes the question to be interesting or important, and usually this involves fitting the question into a framework of well-understood ideas.

A common critique of certain educational systems is that students are expected to learn facts and ideas in the absence of any intellectual need. As a result, the teachers and educational system must provide extrinsic motivation for the students in the form of tests, grades, or other incentives. This gives rise to a whole series of problems, ranging from boredom

Boredom

Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is without any activity or is not interested in their surroundings. The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a...

 to academic dishonesty

Academic dishonesty

Academic dishonesty or academic misconduct is any type of cheating that occurs in relation to a formal academic exercise. It can include* Plagiarism: The adoption or reproduction of original creations of another author without due acknowledgment.* Fabrication: The...

.

Examples

• A student who asks a question is displaying an intellectual need for the question to be answered.
• A birdwatcher who cannot identify a certain bird will often have a strong intellectual need to identify that bird because it represents a hole in their knowledge; however, others might have no intellectual need, even though they also cannot identify the bird.
• One can cultivate intellectual need by giving students a problem they can easily understand but cannot solve, or a question they can understand but cannot answer, before introducing a technique that can be used to solve the problem or information that answers the question.
• If a student cannot understand a question or problem, it cannot provide intellectual need for a solution.
• Giving students a new technique to solve a problem will not be effective if the students are already able to solve the problem through other easier or more enjoyable techniques, because they will have no intellectual need for the new technique.