High-School Students’ Epistemic Knowledge of Science and Its Relation to Learner Factors in Science Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an online contextualized test for assessing students' understanding of epistemic knowledge of science. In addition, how students' understanding of epistemic knowledge of science interacts with learner factors, including time spent on science learning, interest, self-efficacy, and gender, was also explored. The participants were 489 senior high school students (244 males and 245 females) from eight different schools in Taiwan. Based on the result of an extensive literature review, we first identified six factors of epistemic knowledge of science, such as status of scientific knowledge, the nature of scientific enterprise, measurement in science, and so on. An online test was then created for assessing students' understanding of the epistemic knowledge of science. Also, a Res Sci Educ

Measuring epistemologies in science learning and teaching: A systematic review of the literature

“…We searched for articles that were published in the past 10 years, between 2010 and 2019. Ten years is a commonly used time interval for reviewing trends in research, especially for research areas that are proliferating (e.g., Furtak et al, 2012;Takeuchi et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2018). We looked for the intersection of two main areas of search keywords: epistemic or epistemological or epistemology AND science or scientific or biology or physics or physical or chemistry or earth science.…”

“…Besides, four studies used survey questionnaires for measuring practical epistemology, such as the Epistemic Curiosity Scale (e.g., Hong et al, 2016), whereas only one study used a survey questionnaire for measuring productive epistemology. We found only two studies that designed test items (Mayer et al, 2014;Yang et al, 2018) for assessing students' epistemic beliefs, while the remaining studies used survey questionnaires. These self-report questionnaires or tests were used to measure trait-like constructs and to describe the individual differences of epistemologies.…”

“…We found that the majority of the survey questionnaires are rating scales (e.g., Likert scales or numerical rating scales). Some instruments, nevertheless, were designed with multiple-choice or forced-choice items to measure students' epistemologies (e.g., Dudu, 2014;Forsyth, 2016;Mayer et al, 2014;Yang, et al, 2018; see Table 5). Forced-choice items usually include contextualized statements or alternative opinions representing different levels of beliefs.…”

BiblioLab Project: Teachers, Parents and Students’ Perspectives About the Usability and Usefulness of an Educational Distance Learning Platform

“…According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), scientific literacy comprises four interrelated aspects: contexts, knowledge, skills and attitudes [25]. The performance of scientifically literate citizens is dependent on their knowledge of science, which include epistemic knowledge, that "refers to an understanding of the constructs and defining features of science and how these can be used to justify scientific claims" [26]. In addition [27] identify 5 key aspects of epistemic performance: "engaging in reliable cognitive processes that lead to the achievement of epistemic aims, adapting epistemic performance to diverse situations, metacognitively regulating and understanding epistemic performance, caring about and enjoying epistemic performance, and participating in epistemic performance together with others".…”

Epistemic operations performed by high school students in an argumentation and decision-making context: Setrocia’s alimentary emergency

“…Different aspects of epistemic knowledge such as beliefs (Sandoval, 2005;Yang et al, 2018), criteria (Sandoval & Çam, 2011) or practices (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al, 2008;Kelly & Takao, 2002) have been examined in science education literature.…”