2025/05/04 by Jason L. G. Braasch, Brian M. Cartiff, Jeffrey A. Greene +2 · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Educational Strategies and Epistemologies #Education and Critical Thinking Development #Online and Blended Learning
paper · doi:10.1080/00220973.2025.2497442
Barzilai and Chinn (Citation2018) have advocated for framing education more overtly around epistemic matters to help students learn how to create worthwhile epistemic aims, which they achieve by using appropriate epistemic standards and enacting suitable reliable processes. It is not clear, though, whether existing disciplinary education already addresses aspects of epistemic education. The current study examined associations between prior students’ disciplinary achievement and use of epistemic ideals and reliable processes when judging the quality of published research, and planning their own research study. Seventy-one psychology majors completed an Epistemic Criteria and Strategies Assessment, which elicited their abilities to judge the quality of extant published research, and to use their knowledge of research design to design a study of their own within the discipline of psychology. Responses were coded for students’ application of epistemic ideals and reliable processes for producing justifiable knowledge. Results indicated that students did engage in epistemic cognition. In doing so, there were positive associations between prior achievement in psychology courses and more frequent employment of epistemic ideals to evaluate the quality of published research, and with greater evidence for students’ metacognitive reflection on their epistemic ideals and reliable processes when designing a study in psychology. These findings illustrate the importance of incorporating epistemic education in curricula, with implications for future epistemic cognition research.