Epistemic Cognition Within and About the Disciplines

• In Event: Translating Scholarship on Epistemic Cognition: Fostering Public Knowledge and Knowing

Abstract

Education in the sciences, mathematics, history, and literature have always in some fundamental sense been concerned with what it means to know the discipline. Recently, however, disciplinary education researchers have become concerned with explicitly helping students learn how particular disciplines produce and evaluate knowledge. This includes understanding the various forms of knowledge produced within a discipline and the reliable processes (Chinn, Buckland, & Samarapungavan, 2011) developed to produce them. This presentation summarizes trends in recent research on epistemic cognition in the disciplines of science (Elby, Macrander, & Hammer, in press), mathematics (Depaepe, De Corte, & Verschaffel, in press), history (VanSledright & Maggioni, in press), and literature (Lee, Goldman, Levine, & Magliano, in press) to consider how education in the disciplines can make disciplinary knowledge more usable in everyday life.
The most prominent trend is that attention to epistemic cognition in the disciplines is mainly aimed at helping learners understand those disciplines more fully. Processes of knowing, such as contextualization in history, modeling in science, and proof in mathematics, are now more explicitly tied to desired forms of knowledge (e.g., historical accounts, scientific models, mathematical theorems). Helping learners understand how the disciplines develop and evaluate reliable processes for knowing, how those processes relate to specific, disciplinary forms of knowledge, and the aims such knowledge and processes serve are all active foci of instruction and research. This work has uncovered much of value to teachers and others about how learners come to understand the nature of the disciplines. In general, however, education research in the disciplines has only loosely been connected to how young people and adults might use disciplinary knowledge outside of academic environments.
A second trend is that across disciplines it seems that learning science, history, and so on in school typically does not have much influence on how learners see the professional versions of those disciplines. This disconnect between the schooled and professional versions of the disciplines may be partially unavoidable, but has consequences for how people may perceive academic knowledge in the public sphere. A good deal of education reform is aimed at increasing the approximation of school instruction to professional practices in the disciplines. As yet, the promise of such approximations at helping learners understand the nature of the disciplines and their relevance to personal and public decision making is unclear. Drawing from research in the disciplines and related work in psychology, some ideas about how to strengthen connections between the disciplines, school, and everyday life will be presented.

Author

• William A. Sandoval, University of California - Los Angeles