Epistemic cognition, defined as the ways that people acquire, justify, and use knowledge, has been a prominent area of scholarship in educational psychology for nearly 50 years. Researchers have argued that epistemic cognition is a key predictor of many 21st century learning outcomes including critical thinking, scientific literacy, and historical thinking, among others. Despite a large volume of quantitative empirical research on epistemic cognition and academic achievement, there has been no published systematic analysis of this literature. We conducted a meta-analysis of 132 nonexperimental studies in this literature, and found epistemic cognition, as measured predominantly in terms of beliefs, was positively correlated with academic achievement, r = .162, p < .001, indicating a small but meaningful relationship. Moderator analyses revealed models and instruments focusing on development and justification of knowledge had higher correlations with academic achievement than those focused on constructs related to authority. We found evidence supporting domain-general, domain-specific, and topic-specific conceptualizations of epistemic cognition, and stronger correlations when the specificity of the epistemic cognition measure matched the specificity of the achievement measure. Conceptual knowledge and argumentation performance were more strongly associated with epistemic cognition than declarative or procedural knowledge performance. Finally, we found epistemic cognition predicted academic achievement from elementary school through graduate school, suggesting the importance of studying epistemic cognition across all educational levels. These findings have direct implications for honing epistemic cognition theory, creating better measures of epistemic cognition, and developing effective educational interventions on this critical topic.

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Epistemic cognition involves the thinking executed as people discern what they know versus what they question, doubt, or disbelieve. Effective or adaptive epistemic cognition underlies the higher-order thinking required for life in the 21st century and has been positively correlated with academic achievement. As such, researchers have designed a number of educational interventions with the goal of developing students’ epistemic cognition, but no comprehensive examination of their efficacy exists. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to better understand the effect of epistemic cognition interventions upon academic achievement and what characteristics differentiated their efficacy. Twenty-six experimental and quasi-experimental studies met our inclusion criteria. Using 28 independent samples and 59 effect sizes, we found epistemic cognition interventions had a statistically significant, medium-level effect on academic achievement (Cohen’s d = 0.509, p < .001). Moderator analyses revealed interventions based in guided forms of instruction and models emphasizing justification and reconciliation of objectivity and subjectivity were more successful than other interventions, suggesting several promising directions for future research and practice. Surprisingly, we found that shorter interventions were generally more successful in promoting academic performance than longer ones.

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